The Prayer

Life is lovely, life is fleeting, fraught with joy and fear and pain;
My laughter was my sunlight and my tears the falling rain.
I learned this all too quickly, what I could and could not bear,
And my whispered prayers to heaven seemed to linger in the air.

I was caught between a child and a woman, though I felt
That both were hidden somewhere in the maze I called myself.
There was something missing, but I couldn't seem to find
The answer in the otherworld that some would call my mind.

"Are you out there, God?" I asked, as I looked up at the sky.
I waited as the darkness fell, but there was no reply.
Everyone relies on what they see and what they feel,
So if you can't see or feel the truth, how can you know it's real?

Hope is an elusive thing when all the world is dark;
Faith grows faint and slips away when fear has left its mark.
I fell beneath the rushing tide of anger and despair;
It flung me, broken, on the shore, and left me lying there.

I passed into the silent realm, and wandered in my thought,
And looked upon the secret things that time and fate forgot.
There was nothingness below me and an empty sky above;
Life is empty, life is nothing, when you have nothing to love.

I realized then how lost I'd been; my heart had grown so cold:
I walked with slow, uncertain steps on the journey to my soul.
And though my feet stayed planted, I was falling from the light;
My strength was swiftly fading with the coming of the night.

But in the dark I heard a voice that softly called my name;
It called me once, then vanished in the shadows whence it came.
But there was something in that call I'd never heard before:
A breath of life, a note of truth, a hope of something more.

The silence dropped its curtain down and once again held sway,
But the voice continued echoing, the voice that seemed to say,
If I only looked within my soul, I'd find the answer there:
Then the aching wish became a word, and the word became a prayer.