Florin Lacatus Poet Free verse

Confession

Father,
I am tired of counting my mistakes,
I carry them in my soul
like cracked icons.
From each one a tear seeps out,
and in that tear
gathers
the face I once had.

I have loved without measure,
like a blind man
teaching his hands to see.
I have loved,
and their faces clung to my fingers,
until
I no longer knew who I was.

Sometimes I think that
love
is a sin that smells of holy oil,
a kind of wine poured over a wound
so that light
might be made from pain.

Now, as I write,
it seems to me that poetry is a kind of confession
made to a banished angel,
who weeps for you,
but does not forgive you.

Father,
I am ashamed
that I called You only when I was dying,
and forgot You when I was alive.
Ashamed that I wept in silence,
when I could have laughed with You at the table.

And I miss my mother,
the warm broken bread,
that round light from the village,
where even the dogs know how to pray.

Sometimes I think that You too, Father,
have grown weary of so much watchfulness,
and that I would find You more easily
if I looked for You in an old woman
sleeping on a bench in a train station,
with an apple in her lap and a psalm in her pocket.

I have lived my life between two silences:
one was the world’s,
the other, Yours.
And between them, my heart beat
like a rusted pendulum between guilt and forgiveness.

Perhaps You loved me, Lord,
but didn’t have the courage to say so.
Perhaps You too hid in the rain,
ashamed that we resemble each other so much.

Now I no longer ask for forgiveness,
only to be allowed to live within the poem,
like a forgotten priest in the altar of the world,
who has no believers,
but still serves.

And if one day
You call me by name,
don’t say “come,”
but “you have arrived.”
For I, Father,
in truth,
have never left.

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