The Holy Calling – a poem by Cynthia Pitman

The Holy Calling

Silhouettes of strangers
stipple the dark field 
behind my house
that stretches all the way
to the rocky crags
bordering the sea.
I watch them from my window.
Just enough moonlight
settles softly on their shapes
for me to sense their tension,
their fear, their anticipation.
They must await a calling.
I long to join them in the field,
to infiltrate their eerie tableau vivant,
to stand still and tense
as I await the call that will lead me
from my two-dimensional existence
of banality and indifference
into a three-dimensional life
of abundant joy  – 
the life I have always believed
was meant for me –,  not this life 
of cracked emptiness within, 
an emptiness whose rusted scales 
scrape until they lacerate me inside.
I long for a lush sustenance
made of hope, of faith, of possibility.
I must join the strangers in the field.
Surely they seek the same thing.
I cannot endure much longer
this hollow hunger in my soul.
Somewhere there must be sounding
a holy calling to better things.

Cynthia Pitman, author of poetry collections The White Room, Blood Orange, Breathe and Broken, has been published in Amethyst Review, Literary Yard, Bright Flash Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Third Wednesday (One Sentence Poem finalist), Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art (Pushcart Prize nominee), and other journals, and in Vita Brevis Press anthologies Pain and Renewal, Brought to Sight & Swept Away, Nothing Divine Dies, and What is All This Sweet Work?