For Dead Molesters Whose Secrets We Kept
Closure is elusive, and maybe justice more so, but this Chattanooga poet is determined to pray, question, and bless the wounded.
Pray foAfter William Evans
Pray for those who art not in heaven
though the preacher promised them they would be
as they lay in front of the church,
rigor mortis, stone cold dead, but made up
to look like the mug shot we gave
the undertaker.
Question if our forgiveness for their sins
against us, against our bodies, against our childhood,
will actually free them of the atrocities
we can recant if we try
not to suppress them.
Who will deliver us from their evil
if they took the evil with them,
and didn’t admit and release it, like the thief
on the wrong side of the crucified Jesus,
still hanging onto his cross of unbelief?
The power was never something we possessed,
though we yearned for its voice.
May we rest in peace.
About the author
Born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, Cynthia Robinson Young migrated back to her family’s Southern roots after a 30-year stopover in California, and now lives in Chattanooga. She is the author of the chapbooksMigration(2018), for which she was named finalist in the 2019 Georgia Author of the Year Award, andReflections of a Feral Mother(2024). Her work has appeared inThe Writer’s Chronicle, The Ekphrastic Review, Poetry South,and an excerpt from her novel in progress entitled “Why Mama Mae Believed in Magic,” appears in the anthologyDreams for a Broken World(Essential Dreams Press, 2022).