It’s not hard to have faith
on summer evenings,
to gaze into the hot mouth
of dusk & believe
in the inventor of light.
I’ve never felt closer to God
than on a humid Florida night,
skin humming with sweat,
wondering who was out there
among the hiss & croak,
imagining the slither of belly on grass,
the scrape of wing on wing.
One sunset I saw an alligator
crawl from a canal to taste
the whiteness of an egret.
The bird had been watching the horizon.
That same horizon let me believe in
possibility, too, as if the sky
could be its own god,
vast & filled with emptiness.
But then midnight came & with it
loneliness, so fierce
that my heart tore silently, wistfully,
and I hoped there was a God,
one who would sew it back together
carefully, tenderly.
By S. M. Badawi