RUMINATE is a poetry journal that provides an arena for faith, literature and art to meet and mix. Two poems of mine appear in issue #8: A New Science of Prayer; and, In The Beginning:
A New Science Of Prayer
We were curled by the fire, six of us ruminating
on lives still in mid-sentence. No-one went to church,
most of us wandering into therapy, meditation, support groups
for anonymous wounds. The world loomed large,
a mysterious tabernacle—the jagged contour of war & want
long ago eviscerating faith from each chest—six red hearts
pulsing under black sky, a kind of confession, what remained
of song. It had become clear no-one would save us, but
the double-blind Russian studies turned our conversation
to prayer, nonetheless—
how they’d mailed envelopes around the globe to believers,
circles of prayer from every tradition—Muslim, Christian,
Buddhist—asked to linger on each name, savor it as a seed,
a point of light to grow inside the sick. How the other lists
lay guarded—plenty of names to go around—idling
on a researcher’s clipboard: no prayer, no song.
The results, while no miracle, spoke the language
of science: that numbers don’t lie, that those murmured
on the lips of the faithful showed statistical improvement—
the kind any god would be jealous of.
The fire flitted in our eyes, six pair of rubies—
forgotten verse forming again in our throats,
wondering what we’d fallen into, these dark years,
flailing, ensnared as prey in sticky web,
a kind of martyrdom. Maybe we lived
caught in the invisible threads of our own design,
blind—that these strands of luminous reciprocity
also connect us when touched—rhythmical waves
arcing as magnetic currents through gray matter,
the miracle of bone, of nerve-ending, of muscle—
what we are, what we do, vibrating
uncontained by skin, swaying the world
one way, then another, this
we could believe. This we could pray—
that the coiled syllables of our lives
would emerge: aural, palpable,
undeniable.
In the beginning
it must have been like this:
a small boy sitting on the floor, hunched over
his new electric football set, unwrapped in all its glory,
rapt attention fused, timeless, as one miniature football player
after another is placed halfway between two opposite goals,
the polarities inherent in any game, squaring off in pairs,
a jolt of electricity every few seconds vibrating the board,
the subtle dynamics of each player’s plastic feet
a kind of evolutionary determinism: which one
will be stronger, faster, move straight ahead or curve
endlessly in circles—and the boy,
a god, lingering over the nuances of combination:
which ones, together, make the best team, the worst,
or perfectly paired as equal adversaries in the yin & yang of struggle,
the eloquent teamwork, the kaleidoscope of competition more addictive
than its opposite: this dull calm of knowing, everyday,
that your life is empty, the vast spaces of suburbia stretching
like endless dark matter in a vacuum with no boundary—
the universe, the young child delighting in the joyous clash
of every unknown: what will happen next?
the possibility of creation its own balm,
so intimate, these twinned struggles—
galactic enterprise in the personal, this to be or not to be
haunting the vacant seconds ticking in the catacombs of DNA,
each synapse a nerve-bridge between spirit & matter,
the world a hologram, the board, the boy, the plastic limbs
with kneepad & cleat, the helmeted heads, the contrary goals
at either end of this spectrum of progress or regression,
this whole damn thing (blessed beyond mere joy)
the reason
that each morning a sun rises in the vastness, coloring
the black sky purple, then orange, finally blue—and the boy
lazes from his bed, still in pajamas, and it’s Sunday, and today
just like yesterday, just like any other eon, anything could happen,
the reason for his smile—his Cheshire cat grin shimmering
in the ethers, what remains as everything else disappears.