The Garden of Verse: Poems Like Prayers in March's Verse-Virtual

            Poets have a wide of variety of uses for "prayer" -- the word and the concept. They don't necessarily pray 'for' something. They don't necessarily "recite" a prayer. And sometimes, as in the poems written on the theme of prayer for the March issue of Verse-Virtual.com, they make them up. 

            In "Benediction" Wesley McNair writes his own prayer of blessing. The diction and image flow seamlessly in this poem about flowering plants (or 'nature,' 'the seasons,' or what Thoreau famously called "wildness"), exactly mirroring its subject.

            Those "lilies of the field" we are asked to consider may stop attracting our eyes when their flowers have passed, but they remain part of a pattern and a process that the poem aptly names as "the joy of everything":

"Consider the lilies of the field,

how they grow

beyond their flowering, no longer

beautiful to our eyes. Consider

the brittle-petalled, black

centers of the black-eyed Susans,

waving like pom-poms

in the cold wind."

            Everything connects in this wonderful "Benediction."

             Prayer often mixes with other occupations, as noted in the title of DeWitt Clinton's poem "ON LISTENING TO ITALIAN ARIAS WHILE STOPPING FOR COFFEE ON ROSH HASHANAH."

            Not such a stretch when you think about it. The lovers and dreamers of Italian opera often find themselves in desperate straits and turn to prayer for help, or at least comfort. The poem spreads its universalizing notion of prayer from opera singers to rocks, the sky, water, animals and finally to people trying to compose prayer. The final request, believably enough, is for more time.

            In David Chorlton's poem "Night Trains," the rattle of trains passing along the track "click like rosary beads." In this tightly woven poem, the trains see everything ahead with "a single eye." Whether this excellent poem is a benediction or an inquisition -- "They take trees by the root/ and rattle their leaves" -- is up to us. Maybe both.

            In Barbara Goldberg's "Flock," the familiar language of a religious text is put to new uses that evoke the sacredness of the everyday.

"The Lord is my shepherd

He rides a red tractor

His work boots caked

With earth and dried dung"

            Words from sacred texts we are likely to hear over and over again can birth new poems, just as lines from Shakespeare or Frost do. Here the words of a psalm mix with images from the everyday, as the poems encompasses a real shepherd and his sheep, a "red tractor," "a black dog yapping/ to keep them in line," and some well cared for sheep who "do not want." The combination leads me to feel that the sacred is everywhere.

 

            Sarah White's poem "God Creates Eve on a Prayerbook Page" extends the notion of prayer to include the medieval practice of "illuminating" the meaning of the text with often highly individualized visual depictions. The poem continues this fertile relationship by offering a vivid praise song to a curiously engaging illustration. It notes "God had clothes galore—
Crown, cloak, robe of illuminations blue,
beard, a bit like Charlemagne’s, aflower."

            While Adam, "wore nothing but his curled coiffure."

            At the end our banished first couple dream of "a place/ like a tapestry" -- with a loose string that "she" cannot help pulling. The poem is brilliant fun, capturing a lighter-hearted humanity in this ancient art.

            The dog in Jefferson Carter's poem "Strep Throat" is indeed a loving dog. He is the answer to a sick man's prayers. The poem wittily ties together the speaker's remembrance of Che Guevara (who called apolitical friends "Drunks, singing, their throats/ about to be cut") and his own title malady, by depicting the devoted canine's entrance into the sufferer's bed "wriggling the comforter
aside & draping himself
over my head like
someone’s flung beret." A happy and satisfying image.

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          Marilyn Taylor's "Poem for a 75th birthday" is an implicit prayer of gratitude written in the language of love. She captures her husband, a gifted gardener, in this beautiful depiction:

 "it’s nearly evening
and here you still are, slow-dancing
in your garden, folding and unfolding
like an enormous grasshopper in the waning
sun." 

            This prayer of thanks then moves straight to a sort of theological certainty:

 "...I lean
in your direction, absolutely satisfied
that summer afternoon is all
there is, and night will never fall."

            I take away from this poem an image of a vision.

            There's so much, as another contemporary lyric puts it, to be thankful for in these and the many other fine poems in Verse-Virtual's March 2018 issue. http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html

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