The Easter Sunday My Faith Strayed

A thurible swung solemnly
voices sang for risen King
and sweet incense was billowing.

Prayers of the Faithful asked
help for Syria,
comfort for their suffering.

As I spoke, “Lord, hear our prayer,”
the holy smoke
grew strangling.

I looked above the altar to the cross
and there I saw— not God—
a grotesque sacrifice of flesh

arms outstretched
a rigor-mortised mess
of tangled limbs

children frozen in a nightmare
woken state
their opened eyes

and hands beseeching
help
which never came.

What God allowed
the suffering
these ruddy-cheeked endured?

What God allowed
these babies to be taken evermore
from Mother’s hip?

What God allowed
a Father to never feel again
the pulsing warmth beneath a kiss

he presses
to the temple
of his heart?

No!
NO!
No Father Art!

No resurrection faith imparts
to tiny bodies
packed in final rest on plastic flatbeds.

Don’t you see
those children, God,
are dead?

*Author’s Note: Written Easter Sunday, 2017, shortly after a chemical weapon attack killed several children in Syria; Newspapers printed a photograph of the children’s corpses stacked in the back of a truck.

 

 

Lost and Found Still Lost

In the black of the hole in the leper’s face
where disease had replaced his nose
I found my own lack of faith.

I found fear on my lips when I kissed her cheek
the child’s wounds reminding me
not everything lost can be saved.

 

 

image1Carrie Danaher Hoyt is a poet, lawyer, wife, and mother of three. Carrie has poems published online with several journals including Anti-Heroin Chic, Amethyst Review, The Cabinet of Heed, Twitterization Nation, 8 Poems Journal, and the Pangolin Review. She also has poems in two anthologies published by Fly on the Wall Poetry Press. You can find Carrie on Twitter @CDanaherH

Featured photo credit: Amanda Ollinik  @Allunderonemoon