233 - Learning to Prey Alone

Learning to Prey Alone
By Fredrick Zydek

It's one thing to pray in a large room
filled with people holding books of prayer,
and a priest telling us which page to read from.
Those are good prayers. They stick to the gut
and can lift away even our darkest dreams.

But it's the prayers we say in isolation,
the ones we must write for ourselves
that gnaw their way through brittle bone.
Into these prayers we enter both blind and deaf,
and must learn to fend for ourselves.

There's a strange porosity to such prayers.
They make their way through the same stuff that fills them.
In such prayers I learn my little name,
find the one thing that makes it noble.
Grace is slippery stuff when one walks alone.

Fredrick Zydek: is a writer of essays, book reviews, fiction, and poetry, whose work has appeared in such journals as Theology Today, America, Catholic World, and New England Review. He has also published four collections of poetry.