Elegy to the Serenity Prayer God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. But I am no Solomon. And right now, I have none of the answers. Lightning strikes scar every cell, a tornado wrecking havoc in my stomach. My body a bomb just waiting to go off. I am a muse. I am God in these skies. Nothing will control me, much less this body of mine. I grasp immortality in my right hand, turn back the clock, twist the jagged edge that is the end. Who ever said the worst could happen? Sometimes I wonder what it will finally be like to fly. To taste July on my lips, my rage condensing into hurricanes in the sky. To hell with it. Finally, I will not be burned. Finally, I’ve seen the light. There’s a reason why we can’t fly. There is too much holding us down. The weight of the world is too much for our shoulders to carry. But gravity will soon become a filibuster inside this dawdling heart of mine. But even if I try to rewrite my ending, nothing will change. I’ll close my eyes inevitably And give in to the unknown. I will chase this thing called denial and release. And in an instant, I will lose it all. Lose the onyx bubbling into the crevices where my lips once were. Lose my bones, solidifying into calcite in between my ribs. I will lose it all with eyes open against the light. Perhaps death is beauty in certainty. But again, I am no Solomon. And my moral quandaries will never stray from home.
Ashlyn Roice is a junior at Mountain House High School in California. Her poetry has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and has been published in Defiant Magazine.
Amethyst Review 