Winter Prayer

Winter Prayer


The brittle voiceless earth
will not add to the music wind just now,
not one pale green lyric, not one tender syllable,
not a word, not a sound, not
today, not tomorrow.

The distant sun’s disinterest
will continue in the time next to come.
The harrowing cold will remain, asking and unanswered.
The withering light will wither more
while certain souls make a wishful study
of the sky, advancing their theories of the coming thaw.

What scientist or priest first noticed the shape?
—of a stone turning in hand, or the sewer’s needle
disappearing into dark fabric and appearing again
each time—each breath following the next
to ignite the heart’s same effort
—what scientist or priest?

Dissident?

Prophetic?

As yet, the prayer I am imagining
hasn’t any words. It doesn’t ask or prescribe
faith, or acceptance, or hope. It is only
that understanding of music that would try
to hear and hold it —know it, that it might survive the larger silence.
It is that memory without mind that dark envisions
the frigid seed in a lifeless matrix of soil,
soil that, it is somehow known, will again, one day soon
—in time, warm —then waken,

just utter —then sing.

Not today, not tomorrow, but again.






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