Sunday Afternoon Prayer: A Prayer of Resurrection

It has been a long winter for me, and a friend knew I needed some beauty in my life.  She gave me Mary Oliver’s newest book of poetry, A Thousand Mornings: Poems.  In this book I found a poem that gave me an image and a prayer for my life.  It points to the hope of resurrection, which makes it a good prayer for today.

Hurricane

It didn’t behave

like anything you had

ever imagined.  The wind

tore at the trees, the rain

fell for days slant and hard.

The back of the hand

to everything.  I watched

the trees bow and their leaves fall

and crawl back into the earth.

As though, that was that.

This was one hurricane

I lived through, the other one

was of a different sort, and

lasted longer.  Then

I felt my own leaves giving up and

falling.  The back of the hand to

everything.  But listen now to what happened

to the actual trees;

toward the end of the summer they

pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.

It was the wrong season, yes,

but they couldn’t stop.  They

looked like telephone poles and didn’t

care.  And after the leaves came

blossoms.  For some things

there are no wrong seasons.

Which is what I dream of for me.