More on: prayer

do these monks with their straight lines / and right angles have the only franchise?

Sometimes it seems inane. A woman visiting my church one Sunday morning came up and told me she saw a picture of me in a beautiful yellow dress. That was it, the whole prophetic word. Me in a yellow dress.

Prayer is silence, / spirit-bones and soul-blood fluctuant as breath.

The night of my most pain
a new girl came and was put
in the opposite bed.

In our solemn conversations about the firemen, in our statements of unconditional loyalty and trust, I realize that maybe instead of the moral authority of God in our household, I have given Toby the firemen. Brave and noble, yes, but a shabby substitute for the Almighty.

All at once the stillness breaks
into a great applause of wings, the mounting up
in doxology, the downsweep then
of many heads in prayer.

O Listener, You know how pleased I can be with the sounds of my own words. But sometimes a prayer comes out half chewed, like a tough crust that sticks in the teeth. Or spat out, the stone from a sour plum. What if my prayer is thin, rote, barren of belief? If so, remind…

From cramped to roofless ——-I became—I don’t know how— ————–an open-air temple with no pillars. My walls of stone, lichen-covered, where many feet came to pray. ——-The willows shook around me ————–as mice and small insects knelt in moonlight, I could feel the breath of many spirits ——-winging through my chamber: ————–rabbis dropping pocket lint—…

Out of exceeding gloom and out of God, I break a prayer from a growl and sing a hymn more ordinary than tap water. I pray that I might be more than my skin, this dance of atoms, this ritual of ash, this tribe of twilight and rattled angels, this pattern of epiphanies rejected. I…