Upon Seeing A Child Sleeping On A Pavement

Is it possible
We are more alone
than we think:

that the angels we were taught to call to
in our times of need are no less divine
than we ourselves are, that they could do no more
than walk on the same ground as we do,
that the wings we think they elevate us with
when we need lifting up
from our daily despondencies

are nothing more than creations
of our capricious minds, reasons
we come up with in our failure to put a finger
on the things we could not name,
that our superstitious minds
hook themselves on, for lack of a more tangible anchor

in the same way that we have coined the prayers
that we mumble as we look upwards to a heaven
that could just as well be no more than a blanket
of nothingness which our scientists have only just begun
to understand, a smallness
in one endless unknown,
the unknown itself a monstrous uncertainty
we would rather not come face to face with,

when the tv documentary we watched the other night
established the presence of blackholes
which could, at any point in time, swallow
our earth and, with it, the things we knew so well
and did not know, shatter
everything we had taught ourselves to believe,

could tear our unknowing, sleeping selves
into shreds and no angel would come to undo
such an undoing, no miracle to put the pieces
back into place?