A Thanksgiving Prayer for 2020

 

Gracious God, this Thanksgiving

we gather full of both gratitude and grief.

We are grateful for the food on our table

and grieve the empty chairs around it.

We are grateful for technology that connects us

and grieve the loss of a simple human touch.

We are grateful for seasons of abundant harvest

and understand that fields must sometimes lie fallow.

We humbly ask that you feed our hungering hearts,

weary spirits and beleaguered bodies

with generous helpings of your sacred strength,

extravagant love and radical resilience.

Thank you, O God, for this gift of life

and the privilege of living it.

Amen.

Sharon Seyfarth Garner - November 21, 2020

Benediction

 

For what we are given.
For being mindful of what we are given.

For those who grieve and those who celebrate.
For those who remain grateful in the face of everything.

For the assembly of words that links us together.
For individual speech that becomes speech shared.

For the transformations a written page may effect in us.
For those who pay attention.

For the teachers who gave us the chrysalis of language.
For the comrades of the heart who left us signposts.

For the parent who gave us the one ethic of discipline.
For ourselves who may take discipline to heart, and not resent it.

For the second chance that is the writing down.
For those who know that half of poetry is silence.

For the language of breath, and the breath that is prayer.
For those who wake to light, and know the depths of sacrament.

For this common meal, and us who bow our heads and partake.
For those who remember that "so be it" is also written

Amen.

Nicholas Samaras, Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry, Jay Hopler and Kimberly Johnson, editors (Yale University Press, 2013)

Newtonian Nocturne

 

I am sitting next to him in the front seat of his pickup
looking at the stars and trying to remember the laws of motion:
how a body in motion will remain in motion. And a body at rest
will remain at rest, until, or unless....And whenever one body
exerts a force onto a second body, etc., etc. and so on. I can smell
the frayed remainder of his cologne, feel the warmth of his knee
not quite touching mine. Moonlight lays itself along the field
and something stirs in the shadows. I can't help wondering
how one body might act upon another—though I have a feeling
we'll both keep minding the empty space between his right thigh,
my left, our bare arms, the heavy air that separates our lips.
I wish I could turn on the radio and listen to some crooner croon
about what we won't say. But there's only the drone of cars
passing on the main road and crickets singing in the dark grass.
He rolls down the windows and we breathe in the cool night air,
looking up at our galaxy of milk, that wash of luminaries
spilled across the sky, which, however bright they seem,
are moving—even now—farther and farther away.

Danusha Lameris, Bonfire Opera (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)

Unwise Purchases

 

They sit around the house
not doing much of anything: the boxed set
of the complete works of Verdi, unopened.
The complete Proust, unread:

The French-cut silk shirts
which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet
and make me look exactly
like the kind of middle-aged man
who would wear a French-cut silk shirt:

The reflector telescope I thought would unlock
the mysteries of the heavens
but which I only used once or twice
to try to find something heavenly
in the windows of the high-rise down the road,
and which now stares disconsolately at the ceiling
when it could be examining the Crab Nebula:

The 30-day course in Spanish
whose text I never opened,
whose dozen cassette tapes remain unplayed,

save for Tape One, where I never learned 
whether the suave American 
conversing with a sultry-sounding desk clerk
at a Madrid hotel about the possibility
of obtaining a room
actually managed to check in.

I like to think
that one thing led to another between them
and that by Tape Six or so
they're happily married
and raising a bilingual child in Seville or Terra Haute.

But I'll never know.
Suddenly I realize
I have constructed the perfect home
for a sexy, Spanish-speaking astronomer
who reads Proust while listening to Italian arias,

and I wonder if somewhere in this teeming city
there lives a woman with, say,
a fencing foil gathering dust in the corner
near her unused easel, a rainbow of oil paints
drying in their tubes

on the table where the violin
she bought on a whim
lies entombed in the permanent darkness
of its locked case
next to the abandoned chess set,

a woman who has always dreamed of becoming
the kind of woman the man I've always dreamed of becoming 
has always dreamed of meeting.

And while the two of them discuss star clusters
and Cézanne, while they fence delicately 
in Castilian Spanish to the strains of Rigoletto,

she and I will stand in the steamy kitchen,
fixing up a little risotto,
enjoying a modest cabernet,
while talking over a day so ordinary
as to seem miraculous.

George Bilgere, Haywire (Utah State University Press, 2006)

In the Basement of the Old Stone Library

Off the hot street and down
the narrow stairwell,
I entered the smell of books—
a musty scent of paper and ink.
How I loved entering the stacks,
shelves taller than I was.
Loved running my hands
along hardcover spines
wondering at the worlds inside.
I was allowed twelve thin books,
that meant twelve chances
to travel to realms where monkeys
stole hats and the Whangdoodle snoozed.
Twelve chapters in which I
was no longer an awkward girl
but a baker in an old village
or a mouse in an attic befriending a girl
who was something like me,
or at least like the girl I wished I could be,
a girl who was brave, a girl
who couldn’t help but stumble
every single time
into happily ever after.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, wordwoman.com, November 17, 2020 

Domestic Work, 1937

All week she's cleaned

someone else's house,

stared down her own face

in the shine of copper—

bottomed pots, polished

wood, toilets she'd pull

the lid to—that look saying

 

Let's make a change, girl.

 

But Sunday mornings are hers—

church clothes starched

and hanging, a record spinning

on the console, the whole house

dancing. She raises the shades,

washes the rooms in light,

buckets of water, Octagon soap.

 

Cleanliness is next to godliness ...

 

Windows and doors flung wide,

curtains two-stepping

forward and back, neck bones

bumping in the pot, a choir

of clothes clapping on the line.

 

Nearer my God to Thee ...

 

She beats time on the rugs,

blows dust from the broom

like dandelion spores, each one

a wish for something better.

 

Natasha Trethewey, Poetry 180, Library of Congress 

Come Forth

 

I dreamed of my father when he was old.

We went to see some horses in a field;

they were sorrels, as red almost as blood,

the light gold on their shoulders and haunches.

Though they came to us, all a-tremble

with curiosity and snorty with caution,

they had never known bridle or harness.

My father walked among them, admiring,

for he was a knower of horses, and these were fine.

 

He leaned on a cane and dragged his feet

along the ground in hurried little steps

so that I called to him to take care, take care,

as the horses stamped and frolicked around him.

But while I warned, he seized the mane

of the nearest one. "It'll be all right,"

he said, and then from his broken stance

he leapt astride, and sat lithe and straight

and strong in the sun's unshadowed excellence.

Wendell Berry, thebeautywelove.blogspot.com, November 6, 2020