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| Poem and Prayer |
I told Red Shuttleworth, an accomplished poet whom I just recently discovered, that I am an atrocity as a poet. That is an understatement. He said I should write a poem anyway. I did, and here it is.
I hate to write poems
because I'm bad at it
I'm no better at praying
which I'm almost never
always doing
I joined a church recently after a twenty-five year hiatus from churches altogether. As a member of this church, I was looking for a service group to join that didn't involve lots of meetings. I now knit prayer shawls.
I don't know how to knit. I did get a quick tutorial at a group meeting this week and now we each knit separately, and will meet again in September with our work. All I can tell you about this group of older women is that when I got in my car to drive home, I felt like I had encountered a living prayer. I was dripping wet from a warm soak in a tub of grace. The group and the individuals in the group didn't say anything about mercy and the divine, or about hope, which I find to be a particularly annoying word. I am the widow of a cancer victim who fought a thirteen-month knife fight in the alley cancer treatment marathon battle. Then, he died anyway. Observing this, living through this, living beyond this, I developed a grudge against the idea of hope so fierce that it may outlive me. I don't know yet. No, these women knitters talked about knitting, yarn, how to knit. They introduced me to a prayer I can say when I start knitting if I want to. Right now I believe that prayer might be the only thing that stops me from finding knitted shawls at the thrift store and passing them off as my own in September.
Knitting for someone you don't know who is hurting in some also-unknown way is a poem and a prayer, is it not?
This is where my widow life has taken me this past week. It was Pentecost at church, which is about a time in Christian history when everyone was speaking separate languages and misunderstanding each other, until doves and flames came along and united the spirits of everyone, causing them to know what good things needed to be done. The super involved people at my church put on quite a pageant about flames and doves. It was electrifying, really. Another poem, another prayer. I took from this particular day in Christian faith that something powerful sometimes unites people in a way that makes real change possible. Call it the holy spirit, call it god, call it Pentecost, call it whatever you want to call it, at the root of humanity there is the potential to turn away from doing bad things to the earth and each other, and do only good. Almost nobody has made a complete and unqualified decision about that, and therein lies our difficulties on planet earth. The world's problems are not political, they are spiritual. That's my read. My poem. My prayer.
In the garden this week, I finally paid someone to shovel the remaining endless cubic yards of wood chips from my front yard to my back garden. I shoveled valiantly for three weeks, blowing out my shoulder several times, and managed to knock out well over ten yards. I was almost never always praying about those chips. I wanted to cry out to my neighbors -- another poem:
Arborist chips are far superior
to cultivated bark
they get wormier
they rot and make rich dirt
Yes, they are smoking now
I get it that it's an eyesore
I'm sorry, but only in a way
that I don't really mean
I say a poem and a prayer and not writing poems and not praying are all prayers. Everything we do is a poem and a prayer. I'll never be a great knitter. I'm not even a knitter yet because my fingers are crooked and pudgy and it's hard.
But, I'm trying.
If I don't say another word ever about being a widow, how to be a widow, what a widow experiences or what can become of widows, I can say that. I can write that poem. Any widow can.
The sun comes up
I rise
I do something
don't stop and pray for me
don't write a poem about my loss
don't interrupt my prayer, my poem
Amen.
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