Fragments of the One True Loss

We will not die in the world we were born to. Things will be lost.How they came to be lost will be told to prove our unworthiness.

All our stories now are titled, How It Is We Have Come to This:how, on our watch, the waters rose or hordes swept through;

how plague came followed by drought or drought camefollowed by plague; how we allowed our children to leave

for the cities. How once, in the time of our testing, a relic wasvouchsafed to us—a remnant of Gethsemane’s darkness,

a splinter of lifeline crushed at the foot of the cross,a halo bone of the risen Christ—and the relic was lost.

In the rueful wake of that failing, we forged a vessel worthyof immense emptiness, and of course, it was for the grandeur

of this reliquary we found ourselves famous. Whereuponwe smashed it to dust. In the aftermath, there remained to us

only the dark we cupped between folded hands—fragments ofthe one true darkness to which we have now withdrawn to brood

on our children—sailing west, seeking Eden. We knowwhat that search will come to: nothing—a ruined garden, empty

as the lockets in the hollow of their throats holding photosof our faces, young. We wait for their stories to return to our shores

bearing the beloved names we gave them, each name emptyingeven now of its own story, the one that contains the world

we will die in.