Prayer

(Indian Church, 1929 by Emily Carr,
1871-1945, Canadian painter and writer
whose work celebrates the cultures of
the Indians of the Pacific Northwest)

We now conclude the poems for November, which contemplated the old drama that, in the words of Linda Pastan, takes place this month:

the disappearance of the leaves,
this seeming death
of the landscape

“If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life was ‘Thank you,’ that would suffice.” ~ Meister Eckhart (1260?-1327?), German philosopher, theologian, and mystic

PRAYER

Whatever happens.
Whatever what is is is what I want.
Only that. But that.

~ Galway Kinnell, born 1927, American poet and translator

St. Francis and the Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
or everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

~ Galway Kinnell, b. 1927, American poet and translator