A Father's Prayer Poem by Seamus O' Brian

You are my floating lanterns.

I pray that you have escaped,
distilling from me whatever
residue of grace was breathed
into me when matter became
this soul, when the fingerprint
of God smudged this fractured clay,
when the breath of heaven
somehow condensed onto
the warped mirror of who I am.
I pray that once released,
you float beyond the gravitational
pull of the orbit I have created by
the nucleation of this assortment
of surface binding inadequacies,
the accumulation of frailties and
omissions I have called life.

I pray that those few particles
that history and ultimate Divinity
may label the best of me
find their way into you, and
that the overwhelmingly
underwhelming rest of me
evaporates into the light of
a sun which will lead you
higher than I have ever gone.

I pray that all of the struggles
I have floundered through with
this creviced soul will find you,
augmented by the same grace
that propelled the ungainly craft
of my turbulent existence,
more sufficiently prepared and
more adequately forewarned
to brave the valleys
and gain the summits
of the terrain superimposed
upon the existence
that you will call life.

I let you go with the breath
Of hope releasing slowly,
slowly,
as your flight to the stars
begins.

Father of the winds,
Watcher of the sparrows,
carry my little lanterns
securely to their place
in your great journey.

Little lanterns, fly away,
fly away to the heights
I have never known
but ever longed to see.

Father of the winds,
carry these fragile lights
safely to the high places
where they will become
the luminaries you envisioned
at the birth of time.

Little lanterns, you have illuminated
the days of my life
with love and wonder,
now fly away and whisper to me
what the world is like
from the heights you climb.