I lost my lost saints in pieces. With some,
their voices eroded slowly then quickly like graveyards
on seaside cliffs crumbling into ocean. Some
began shaking: their hands, then arms, then legs.
Some stood up when they could not stand
and fell because it was too late for the miracles
they could not perform. Some waited too long
to see the doctor. All arrived at the hospital
too late. One did not return with the martins he loved
to the churches of Krakow. One unspooled
tire tracks in the snow like a long staff of sad music
the night he drove away to try to no longer be a saint.
Some turned out to be so evil they’ve been rewritten
as monsters, devils, people I wish I had never met.
My true lost saints didn’t know what to do or feel
about those people any more than I do now.
My lost saints did not direct the orange light of dusk
to burn away the line that separated the sky
from its reflection in the bay’s slow incoming tide,
causing me to once again mistake beauty for grace—
but at least one would have said it doesn’t matter,
that some mistakes are actually corrections.
Another would have said I’m too much in love
with grace. I’ve looked for my lost saints
in bombed and rebuilt cities, castle ruins, the edges
of swamps and woods, briefly seen their faces in the faces
of strangers, the beautiful illusion suddenly illegible,
like a hummingbird’s sequined collar blurred in flight.
One believed that you should add fat for flavor,
another that poetry was a search for consequence.
One pleaded for us to remember harder. They have
no niches or shrines. My lost saints have failed
to send messages or signs—but I still hear them
in old voicemails that ask me to please call them back.

 

 

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James Davis May is the recipient of the 2026–27 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. His third book of poems, My Lost Saints (Louisiana State), will be published in the spring of 2027.

 

 

 

Photo by Nathan Paternotte on Unsplash