Prayer to an empty heaven

[trophos]

Thanks so much for your thoughtful feedback! I particularly enjoyed your notes on when it feels religious to you (like in 3rd stanza) - I hadn't even considered that, but I'm delighted you picked it out - that means the poem works on levels I didn't even know about. I guess my thinking was that the absence, almost erasure, of any kind of higher organizing cognizant principle - i.e. god - in the poem would carry out the explicit atheism of the title - apparently not, or at least not necessarily!

I agree with you on the cliche opening of stanza 2 - I'll play around with improving that.

(Hm, now I'm thinking I could do as you suggest and start with L3, but keeping current L3 there as an echo: 'I will walk in parks… / but let love keep its distance. / I will walk…' That's a lot of repetition - especially with the repeated line-initial 'I will walk' - but this poem might have enough repetition already built into it to sustain that.)

'is it more of an atheistic fear of how wounding and possessive romantic love can be?' Hammer, meet head of nail I wrote this in a period following the break-up of a fairly serious relationship when the idea of making a relationship work just seemed exhausting and futile.

cheers