A collaboration with Susie Clevenger. Visit her blog here.

sandpaper stars know
best is brighter than
the last surrender into
blemished expectations

callous words cannot
steal light life has earned
from a baptism of fire.

time lapsed rapture
left us sipping nicotine
from gamma rays where
we were fashioned in
a cloud of dust

we hang tattered, but whole
in a sapphire universe,
forgiving, forgetting,
overcoming the sanded speech
that tried to strip away our radiance.

© Ben Ditmars and Susie Clevenger 2014