It has been foretold
that you will enter an uncertainty, vast and deep –
a dark wood, unattempted yet in prose or rhyme –
armed only with an orange, plastic, pumpkin bucket.
Your parent or guardian
is in the distance somewhere, keeping an eye out, or perhaps
they have their own devices.

And as it must be, you tread on in the night, your little legs
encased in velour, your body propping up a costume
that was cherished once, and not so long ago,
before the weather revealed
how ill-suited you really were to such grandeur.

You will knock on a home – maybe it is your home, or maybe
you have no home to go to, anymore.
You will look up at the door, unmoving,
as solid as the absence of hope. You wait.
The door opens a crack, and then a yard.
From the blackness comes a form.
You lift, to the skies, your orange. plastic, pumpkin bucket.
It is, in the yearning moment, all you have.