A WANDERING CHILD 

In the dark

I came upon a wandering child

too numb and bewildered to know it was lost.

As soon as our eyes met 

I knew there was an angel in the child

with a fallen angelic spirit.

Behind the child’s numbness was a grief,

beneath the bewilderment, a desperation for relief

that would never come.

The child was too stunned to cry any more

and so it spoke to me of what had happened,

how it had found the happy and sad that is in everything.

The child was never prepared for the shock about it all,

how the deeper the experience was, the more intense it became.

At this point the child could say no more but the angelic spirit

spoke silently to me through the child’s eyes.

It showed me the angelic fall, how some experiences are so profound

the intensity of them manifests both heaven and hell.

One could only hope for a life of profound meaning,

but that hope, if it came true, was fated to manifest the extremes.

The more one lived fully, the wider the extremes would stretch.

The angel had fled into the child for comfort,

for only a child’s innocence could shelter the angel’s awareness

from the hellacious truth of how profound was its gain and loss.

I held a steady gaze with the angel as tears now filled the child’s eyes.

What possibly could affect an angel so much, so deeply?

The answer was felt between us as bitter nausea, sinking ache, and hopeless yearning.

A flash heat from the angel’s fallen nature shocked all awareness with sadness.

In the flash was a blistering insight borne from experience and I felt the angel’s pain –

It cried out – there is something far worse than a dream never coming true,

it’s a dream coming true then being taken back, proved wrong

after one spends so long feeling they’ve lived it, for they’ve experienced their dream

only to find it never was, it wasn’t what it seemed, it never happened.

The deepest hell is reserved for the heavens that only thought they were real.

If one never had their dream, they grieve what never was and they never felt.

But if one felt they had their dream only to have it undone, 

then everything one thought and felt it was would have to be grieved as being lost,

everything that was would need to be revisited and accepted as never there. 

To feel one has achieved their dream only to feel it fade as a mirage

is far worse than having a dream that simply never came true, even in one’s fantasy.

This was the fall that made angels cry, that drove them into children to hide.

And the child, numb and bewildered to be carrying such a load

wanders in the same dark as me.

The angel pulls the eyes of the child away from me as I ask,

Is innocence enough to hold back the rest of the fall?

The child turns and walks into the darkness, needing to be alone

with the angel it now perceives is there. As they disappear I feel myself alone,

and the child that I occupy and hide within wanders on,

and I go with it, needing its comfort.