Confession
       

We who go empty-clad
die a little each day,
our backwater bodies too stagnant

for a martyr's melancholy.
Consolation is too much
a late ship. Never the strange

fires here, only moonseed
and hemlock. Only a bereft people
who cling to a thing once worshipped.

O idols, worshipped idols. It is because of you
that I never went to the sea.

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Copyright © 2020 Nancy Chen Long All rights reserved
from Wider than the Sky
Diode Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission