but life intervened, call it streets
blown away after pressure cooker
bomb blasts, children’s bloated
bellies in refugee camps, dead trees
hung with blankets for tents
in war as many dead in accidents
as enemy fire in World War II
my father built battleships
a child, I prayed call it
a niece’s death at 16, cancer,
the universe at 13.8 billion years,
dark energy expanding the cosmos
its edge 47 billion light years away;
call it weariness, resources, nature
accreted, gone (bog matter to peat
to coal to mountain tops blown off,
family farms fracked for gas)
eyesight dimmed, worry for
a friend’s grandchild, cancer
at 10 months, but something in me
still wants to pray, to pray into
the abyss where love may be
though love is only, probably, here
Copyright 2016, Susan Shaw Sailer
Recent poems of Susan Shaw Sailer have appeared or will shortly appear in Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Sugared Water, and Naugatuck River Review. She published a chapbook, COAL (2012), a book, Ship of Light (2013), and has a second book forthcoming, The God of Roundabouts.