I don’t really pray anymore except to say help.
Hopeless we drove by the big hotel,
the one with Scullers Jazz Club and warm cookies on the pillow.
When I woke to worry in the night it came to me how it was
in God’s hands again and now and anyway, how the psalmist
kept repeating for his mercy endures forever
until it became a kind of law.

 

 

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Leslie Williams’s most recent book is Even the Dark (Southern Illinois). Her work has appeared in Poetry, America, Kenyon Review, The Christian Century, and elsewhere.