Ronnie Sirmans

Salvation

I was an indeterminate boy
with so little faith in myself.
Then one day while no one
was paying me much attention,
I met a man walking on stilts,
his pants waving like banners.

He reached down, picked me
up, and gave me a gentle hug.
He kept up the procession
with his talented legs and
strength to bear the burden
while my ordinary legs were
wrapped around his torso.

He asked whether I was crying,
but I said it was just the sprinkles
of low clouds slipping by my face.
We brushed some tree branches,
handfuls of soft-hued blossoms
floating by like natural confetti
for a mystery worth celebrating.

When he tired and lowered me
back down, a pant leg hiked up.
Like a tattoo on skin, an image
had been burned into the wood
of a skinny stilt: I saw thorns
wrapped around a heart afire.

Ronnie Sirmans is an Atlanta print newspaper digital journalist whose poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, Atlanta Review, Plainsongs, The South Carolina Review, Sojourners, Fathom, and elsewhere.