Poem as Prayer

Experience an Ars Poetica for insight & peace

Good morning, Monday. Good morning ice and a snow fit for a fine snowball in your hand. Sculpt a few of them: a pile of snowballs to launch at a target. For fun. You don’t need a machine for this. And when you come back inside, for the spirit, patch a few words together, as Mary Oliver says, in her ars poetica, Praying.

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

I used Oliver’s poem as a prompt in a writing workshop last week. A prompt I whipped up at the last minute as a change of plans. I had prepared, as I always do, a prompt for the morning workshop the day before. But when I woke up, my intuition drew me to the theme of prayer. And I found this moving and simple poem from Oliver. On one level, her poem is, of course, a kind of prayer. It has a quality of imperative: asking us to engage in a ritual. To be still. To notice a moment. Be awake, be aware. And to take a very small action of listening. Because prayers recognize that the simplest acts of devotion can bring momentous changes of feeling, attitude, and outlook. The silver lining voice, the still small voice of God or inner wisdom––whatever you call it, rises into our consciousness from the mysterious unknown to comfort, encourage, uplift or guide or relieve us of suffering.

On another level, Oliver’s Praying is also a poem about writing a poem. Which is an ars poetica:

A poem that explains the ‘art of poetry,’ or a meditation on poetry using the form and techniques of a poem.

What Oliver proves about how writing can work in us as a kind of prayer is so simple and profound. We know this, instinctively. We forget. We need each other’s poems and prayers to remind us. As I am reminding you, as Oliver reminded me. Go ahead. Today. Patch a few words together. And by patch, I think she means it’s okay for these words to be rough and ready, anything handy will do the trick, as when you are patching a hole on some jeans with a piece of a kerchief you cut and sewed over the hole. Isn’t it wonderful? How Oliver uses the word patch? One syllable? With so many wonderful associations? I am thinking now of quilts. How they are patched by memories and scraps to make something beautiful and warm to cover us as we sleep.

I have written myself into a doorway of thanks this morning. Thanks to Mary Oliver. And you, my listener. I hope you will patch a few words together in prayer today too.