Confession in the Age of Scarcity Culture
By Abigail Carroll
I have believed the glaring industrial lie
of too little time. It has wound me up to spin
and spin. I have glittered myself with facts
designed to impress. I have inhabited the creed
I am (only) what I plot, plan, piece together
from mantras, dream scraps, free advice. Oh
save me from the lovelessness of fear. Forgive
my adultery with the gospel of more, my fierce
love affair with getting things done, my stout
allegiance to independence (another term for
loneliness). Forgive me for scorning silence,
ignoring whisper in favor of shout. I confess
cold-shouldering rest, going AWOL from love,
high-pedestalling the antithesis of enough.
Abigail Carroll is author of Cup My Days Like Water, Habitation of Wonder, and A Gathering of Larks: Letters to Saint Francis from a Modern-Day Pilgrim. Her poems have been anthologized in How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope and Between Midnight and Dawn: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide. She lives in Vermont and enjoys playing Celtic harp.
Photo by Heather Zabriskie on Unsplash
This poem appears in the collection Cup My Days Like Water, which was released by Wipf and Stock on May 4, 2023. You can purchase a copy of the collection here.
