Merciel

Your face shines that expensive joy you never got as a child
as he wraps his arm around you and pulls you, close.
Your eyes drown in your reflection in the glass iris, transfixed by the flash
that preserves your beatific vision for all time, filtered of all blemish, framed
on that dusty cornerstone of your heart, once forbidden, now the center
of the universe, the point where your pale face is touched by him,
your prince, your savior, your god, who carried you from the wilderness
into shelter when you were a lowly beggar desperate to be filled
those many weeks ago. Can charity surpass him
who dresses you as delicately as a doll,
who guards you against the cruel world that wants to steal you,
who saves you from your naive curiosity that sometimes looks outside in wonder,
who suffocates those nightmares that tormented you. Solitude! Isolation! Loneliness!
Never can you suffer another moment of such nights. Never again
will you have to. You have found the one – your heart insists – your Prince
Charming, and you are the glass slipper he sits on his mantle
beside the picture of you two at the chapel: the day all your problems
went away.