Prayer
I have written to you before
and though I have tried to wait
I am impatient in my prayers
and I do not know where my praise ends up.
I know I must include it with the ask, send it forth
to the great goddess. Maybe if I lit
candles as I did through Europe as
a college student, saying my mother’s name,
my aunt’s name in various country churches and city cathedrals.
I never prayed for my father or my boyfriend.
It was not as though they were not worth
the coin I pressed into the copper boxes
and listened for — the clang I heard, coin to bottom of the box, or duller coin to coin.
But that they did not hear the call those prayers made as well
as the women who had tended me would. When I said my mother’s name
her life would rise to me and to you, sweet goddess, in our steadfast breath,
and she would know I was fine, without the help of cellphone or email.
I must believe in the prayers again, offered
with make-believe coins in make-believe boxes.
Maybe this poem is the box into which I press the coin,
these beads of words itself the prayer mumble mumble
the sounds are love and must transpire but the prayer is so much
bigger, a terrible ask of you my dear Mary and Elizabeth
who also must be Jesus, Father, and Holy Ghost.
It is a prayer of only-pleading and not only for the dear women who loved me,
but it must attend to the mess of the world,
hear the terrible unformed cries, little yelps in the universe,
and speed something like, not recovery because
who would want to return to what churned this?
but to something like health of bones, of muscle, of lungs,
of love for the other
whom I am yet to meet.
*
[This poem was written in response to a prompt to write a poem “inspired by the prayer format” of Ilya Kaminsky’s poem “Author’s Prayer.”]
* * * * *
Community Garden
The garden has a lock
and the combination is
secret.
The fence is as high
as my waist.
Someone climbed it
last night — Bud Light
royal blue cans and
one large Heineken silver
and green.
I left them snug
between the tomatoes
and the choke cherries
seeded by my neighbor’s plot
for others to find, for others to report.
I’m done reporting.
I’m done respecting fences
that can be climbed over
maybe that should be.