Poet’s Prayer for an Inner City

by Steven Croft

Sing us softly from this ash into the vanishing point
of the future, ride us like a drunk in a ragtopped
convertible to the horizon, leaving any wrecked lives,
our manic journey flush with expectation, let lives
be lived in the form of telling a story, so all dreams
are possible, march street kids out of dirty alleys
to a fair of joyous carnival lights where all rides
are free and their small lives are everything,
give the street corner bums bus tickets to a job
for everyone, let them step through the bi-fold doors
to walk like showmen under the sidewalk festoons
of power lines in an earthquake-bolted town
where success is sure, let streetwalkers walk on,
live in stable homes, let crooks toss away weapons,
reach only into our hands with a friendly shake,
let the mercury-vapor whispers of evening
be without addiction or sin.
&
&

Steven Croft 

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation. For the last thirteen years he has worked in a library. He has recent poems in Sky Island Journal, As It Ought to Be Magazine, Poets Reading the News, I Am Not A Silent Poet, Third Wednesday, Red Eft Review, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Library, and other places.

Artist: Semi Ece 


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