The Poem That Reads Like a Prayer
I don't kneel anymore, but I recite it the same way.
Every night at around 11:40 I do the thing I swore off at nineteen, except now I do it lying down, with the lamp on, holding a blue diary with a cracked spine. I quit praying more than a decade ago... Nobody told my mouth.
The quitting itself was quiet. There was no cinematic storm-out, no fist shaken at the ceiling. I just noticed, sometime during my second year of college, that when I knelt beside my hostel bed the words had stopped going anywhere. They used to feel like coins dropped down a well: you never heard them land, but you trusted the well.
Then one night I heard them land.
Flat, close, right there on the floor beside my knees. After that I could not unhear it. I stood up, got into bed, and that was the whole apostasy. My knees simply retired.
What nobody warns you about is the hole it leaves in the schedule. Prayer, whatever else it was, had been a place where the day went to die properly. Without it, my nights just trailed off. I would scroll until my eyes hurt and fall asleep mid-sentence like a man slumping at his desk. For years I told myself this was freedom. It felt more like skipping dinner and calling it fasting.
The poem arrived, as the important ones do, through a side door. A friend read it aloud at her father's funeral, of all places: Mary Oliver, the one that opens by telling you that you do not have to be good. I had heard the line before, quoted to death on posters and coffee mugs, and I had filed it under things people say. But hearing it in a crematorium hall over the hum of the air conditioning, spoken by a woman with a torn tissue in her fist, I felt something in my chest lean toward it. The way a plant leans. Not a decision. A phototropism.
I went home and copied the poem into the blue diary. By hand, which matters. Typing is transcription, but handwriting is closer to swallowing. Then, because the diary was already open and the pen was already warm, I read it out loud to my empty bedroom.
And my voice did the thing.
You know the thing. The register you use for prayer is not the register you use for anything else. It is quieter than reading aloud and more formal than talking to yourself, pitched at some listener you cannot name. I had not used that voice in ten years. It came out unwrinkled, like it had been kept in a drawer.
I sat there feeling caught... Caught by whom, I could not have said. That was the first night, and I would love to tell you I understood immediately what was happening, but mostly I felt embarrassed and then, underneath the embarrassment... rinsed. Slightly cleaner on the inside. I slept without scrolling for the first time in months.
So I did it again the next night. And then it was simply what I did.
A prayer asks to be answered. A poem only asks to be said. Most nights I honestly cannot tell you which one I need.
Over the years the liturgy grew. Wild geese, then Hopkins when I need the language to be stained glass, then a Kunitz poem about living through many lives when the year is changing and I am not ready. I copy each one into the diary first, always by hand, always in bed, and the diary has become a strange scripture with no theology in it, just evidence.
Some pages are water-stained. One page is warped where I cried on it during the worst March of my life, the one where the flat was so quiet I could hear the fridge think. I found out that month that reading a poem about loneliness out loud is a way of having company over without cleaning the house.
My mother found the diary two winters ago.
She was visiting, and I had left it on the bed like a fool, and my mother has never met a closed notebook she respected. When I came out of the shower she was sitting on the edge of my bed with her reading glasses on, the diary open in her lap, and my stomach dropped through all the floors of the building. My mother prays the way other people breathe. My defection had been a grief to her, one she carried politely, the way she carries all her griefs, in a handbag where you cannot see them but she can always find them.
I braced for the conversation we had been not-having for ten years.
She read for a long time...
She turned pages with a wet thumb, the way she reads everything. Then she looked up over her glasses and said, "You wrote the dates on them."
I said yes. Under every poem, the date I copied it, and sometimes a line about why.
"That is what I do," she said, "in my prayer book. The dates. So He knows I came."
And she closed the diary, patted it twice like the head of a well-behaved child, and asked what I wanted for dinner.
That was the entire theological showdown. Two people who keep attendance registers for different schools, comparing notes.
I have thought about her sentence for two years now. So He knows I came. I do not write my dates for anyone that I can name. But I write them, and something in me needs them written, and when I flip back through the diary I can read my whole life in the choices: the month of funeral poems, the spring I copied nothing but poems about hope as if stockpiling for a siege, the week I tried writing my own from a prompt and produced four honest lines and eleven fraudulent ones and kept the four.
People ask sometimes, people who know I do not believe, why I bother saying poems out loud to a ceiling. I used to reach for clever answers. Poetry as prayer for the doubtful, secular liturgy, that sort of thing. The phrases were true and useless, the way descriptions of swimming are true and useless. Now I just tell them what happens: at 11:40 the diary opens, the lamp is on, the pen keeps my place, and for two minutes my voice goes into the old register and the day dies properly. Whether the words land in a well or on the floor beside my bed, I no longer check. Checking was the mistake the first time.
My mother still prays for me every night. She told me once, undramatically, over tea, the way you would mention watering someone's plants. I did not argue. It occurred to me that at roughly the same hour, in two cities, two people sit propped against pillows, moving their lips over words they did not write, dating their visits, keeping the lamp on a little longer than the day requires.
Same posture. Same hour. Same helpless habit of saying the beautiful thing out loud in an empty room, on the chance that the room is not empty.
She calls hers prayer. I call mine a poem. The ceiling, as far as I can tell, receives them both.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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