An Apathetic Prayer

A sonnet

Photo by Billy Huynh on Unsplash

An apathetic prayer

The sky is always easiest to hate without stars,
the moon also absent, playing its prolonged game
of peek-a-boo. You could look up contemptuously
and cast the most venomous of curses,
where that black sky seems to almost welcome it,
swallowing your anger the way a tar pit might
swallow a car with a dead body in its trunk.

But the sky is a most capricious of confidants,
what it hides in the bed clothes of its darkness,
it might soon uncover in the startling suddenness
of a cloud formation, or the piercing poignancy
of daylight coupled with reflection, everything
a glinting reminder of transience, and the fact
that cancer needs no motive to break your heart.