My Prayer Life

Writing a poem about prayer is hard

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

I subscribe to The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad, and the prompt this week is intriguing to me for a variety of reasons. The prompt is to write a poem about prayer. There are various components to it, but that is the gist of it in a nutshell.

Let me get two things straight.

First, I have a disjointed prayer life. It comes and it goes. I don’t think to pray at some times and then I pray a lot at other times.

Second, I don’t write poetry. I just don’t. It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s something I don’t feel comfortable with or that I don’t feel that I’m very good at.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I decided to write a poem about praying, because I need to do hard things. I need to put myself out there and see what happens. See what sticks. So, here’s what I have to offer:

My Prayer Life

My prayers come in waves.
When life is calm, I often forget to pray.
When life is tumultuous and chaotic, the words come out feverish and panicked.

I long for a prayer life marked with consistency and authenticity.

Prayers that mark the gratitude for small things:
Birds singing in the early…