amphibi.us

Atop the clean new courthouse
a stranger gave us words
I’d forget as soon as I repeated them.
I remember I believed them.

Did we promise eternity?
I’m too small
to know anything that big.
Like miracles. Like sin.

Easy, you might say, for one
with such boring sins
not to believe in them. So good
I must invent harms
to atone for, you think.

I don’t believe in miracles
either, though sometimes you seem
to look on me as one—say, a rainbow
surprising you after the flood
of your self-convicted villainies.

I could ask you, how much penitence
is enough? I might as well ask
how much love is enough.
The answer is never. And now.

© Sari Krosinsky, 2011

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