Sunday Prayers
I don't care if it's a doorknob,
my mother said,
You gotta believe in something.
Her voice was angry but I was a petulant teen and it took me years to hear the sadness she felt. I know now that she wanted me to believe in something bigger than myself, to see beyond the smallness of me.
Today I'm pondering the beauty of doorknobs, knowing that belief is big enough to encompass doubt, and doubt leads to searching, and searching leads to wonder, and wonder leads to . . . anything, everything.
I like how Czeslaw Milosz calls belief, or prayer, a velvet bridge.
On Prayer
You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word 'is'
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.
- Czeslaw Milosz
Still, I am a searcher, questioning my faith even while firmly believing. Jane Mead's poem, Concerning the Prayer I Cannot Make, speaks to this very conundrum, and in a frank tone I appreciate (and that last stanza - wow!):
Concerning the Prayer I Cannot Make
Jesus, I am cruelly lonely
and I do not know what I have done
nor do I suspect that you will answer me.
And, what is more, I have spent
these bare months bargaining
with my soul as if I could make her
promise to love me when now it seems
that what I meant when I said "soul"
was that the river reflects
the railway bridge just as the sky
says it should—it speaks that language.
I do not know who you are.
I come here every day
to be beneath this bridge,
to sit beside this river,
so I must have seen the way
the clouds just slide
under the rusty arch—
without snagging on the bolts,
how they are borne along on the dark water—
I must have noticed their fluent speed
and also how that tattered blue T-shirt
remains snagged on the crown
of the mostly sunk dead tree
despite the current's constant pulling.
Yes, somewhere in my mind there must
be the image of a sky blue T-shirt, caught,
and the white islands of ice flying by
and the light clouds flying slowly
under the bridge, though today the river's
fully melted. I must have seen.
But I did not see.
I am not equal to my longing.
Somewhere there should be a place
the exact shape of my emptiness—
there should be a place
responsible for taking one back.
The river, of course, has no mercy—
it just lifts the dead fish
toward the sea.
Of course, of course.
What I meant when I said "soul"
was that there should be a place.
On the far bank the warehouse lights
blink red, then green, and all the yellow
machines with their rusted scoops and lifts
sit under a thin layer of sunny frost.
And look—
my own palm—
there, slowly rocking.
It is my pale palm—
palm where a black pebble
is turning and turning.
Listen—
all you bare trees
burrs
brambles
pile of twigs
red and green lights flashing
muddy bottle shards
shoe half buried—listen
listen, I am holy.
- Jane Mead
I found these gems in Poems to Live By in Uncertain Times. Sometimes I need a "sign," and today, stumbling upon these poems, I found proof that poetry really is a form of prayer.
Sunday, September 16, 2012 at 12:16PM
Reader Comments (8)
Wow - Jane Mead - just freaking wow. I read a series of short stories today and discovered something eerily similar - my own sign, so to speak. It's all there waiting for those of us who are looking, isn't it? So today I am believing in the power of words to lift us up - and out.
Both of these poems are amazing. And as always happens in this life, they came at exactly the right time.
I love this vivid and "too dear" reminder of your adolescence, Drew, and of the wisdom of your mother. We "gotta believe in something!" She was so right! I believe in empty pages, and box fans, in curley fries and loyal friends, in Queen Anne's Lace and roadside gravel, the sunset as it just happened and the waves coming in, one by one.
What a lovely thing to send on Rosh Hashanah eve. Thank you!
Lisa
Drew, thanks for this lovely post. I think you should write a doorknob poem. The last stanza of the Jane Mead poem knocked the wind out of me in the best possible way. As you might say: Wowza! :) Thanks again from your fellow pilgrim.
Getting to this almost a week late, but it seems like the procrastination has led me to these poems on a day when I really needed them. Although I am not pagan, though I barely consider myself spiritual, I have a reverence for equinoxes and solstices. And I just started _The Artist's Way_ this morning. And lately, I have begun to feel as though my spiritual path is one of perpetual agnosticism, and I'm okay with that. So. These were lovely to read today.
Allyson, thanks for taking the time to read and respond. The right poem finds us at the right time. I'm glad these found you.
And The Artist's Way is excellent. Over the years I've returned to "Morning Pages" and "Artist Dates" many times. Enjoy the experience.
Molly -
A doorknob poem - yes. Let's all write a doorknob poem -- and share 'em here!