A Chance For Salvation, a Poem by Carol Alena Aronoff

For Jimmy: the last stanza

I am exiled, shunned by

those politely civilized

as well as by gatherings

of wolves.

Refugee

from impoverished

maps of misery

and hopelessness.

I am expatriate,

my motherland,

the one that birthed

and then betrayed me,

no longer my home.

No songs of redemption,

no longer

praying for escape.

I am tarnished,

debased

by my own reckoning,

my refusal to rise like wind,

to carry myself forward

past wannabe warriors

clustered like jackals

on street corners.

Instead, I give in

athough I’m no gangster.

Easier to set aside dreams

than resist, risk early death.

Caught with gun, drugs, attitude

before I earn my colors, before

killing fills my resumé and brutality

transfuses my blood. 

Prison for the failed, an antidote for

me, retreat from worse alternatives

as long as I hang tough, wear trouble

on my sleeve to just get by, make fear

a stranger; softness gets you killed or worse,

bravado puts me in the hole. I sit resigned

in empty dark when suddenly the cell is filled

with dazzling light. God appears without my

prayers: a chance for salvation

Carol Alena Aronoff’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Comstock Review, Bosque, Quill & Parchment, Before There is Nowhere to Stand, et al. She was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has published 4 chapbooks (Cornsilk, Going Nowhere in the Time of Corona, Tapestry of Secrets, A Time to Listen) and 6 full-length poetry collections: The Nature of Music, Cornsilk, Her Soup Made the Moon Weep, Blessings From an Unseen World, Dreaming Earth’s Body (with artist Betsie Miller-Kusz) and The Gift of Not Finding: Poems for Meditation. Currently, Carol resides in rural Hawaii.