The faces of saints appear in the curling wax of my great aunt's prayer candle as she weeps pyrrhic tears for her grandson.
She whispers to the mahogany beads of a rosary that remembers the Civil War that my cousin will be the wounded animal that the wilderness preacher pulls from a rusted trap and seals his wounds still clotting.
As a pious girl with a boy's haircut walks past, another candle ignites in hope that lost Johnny can find love running across the parapets of Lyon and Orleans with pyre singed sleeves raising the splintered left side of a door frame, a fleur-de-lis tacked to its most solid knots, in desperate victory.
I asked to be the one to answer her prayers, but the lost boy has heard the love and the prophets through a preacher deafly.
And I move so slow, six more terraces to ascend, with this stone on my back.