March 31, 2013

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. 

              

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