SCRITTURA WEDNESDAY POETRY PROMPT

Hear the Flower’s Plea

Prayer to blossoms and trees for reclaimed souls

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

for Mary

Hail Mary Turner, mother of three
full of grace, courage, and dignity,
I pray your Lord of Lords is with thee,
bless your womb, root-to-leaf, divine tree,
exalt the earth with your fruited seed,
find peace with Us in your hour of need,

holiest Mary, heiress of Earth,
hear the flower’s plea for your rebirth,
grow above lessons of faceless woe,
drinking your fill of the love we sow

with faith, tilling, tending by moonlight
this fertile ground of yours by birthright.

For Mary Turner and her unborn child. (Trigger warning: Graphic violence that actually happened. To learn of Mary’s story is to know despair at our humanity’s capacity for wickedness, cruelty, and unchecked barbarism, but her story is essential. If you can bear it, I gently encourage you to learn more about her.)

I came across Mary Turner’s story entirely by accident, and for the better part of a few weeks, the ghosts of her story has haunted me. I wanted to write my way out of this spiral in a way that I hoped would appease her ghost without placing focus upon her wicked assailants.

As a former Catholic, I found that the prayer Hail Mary was the perfect base to begin.

In Wry Welwood’s prompt, he described what he called “writer’s strangles”; when we, as writers refuse to write a painful poem, but the subject of that poem won’t turn us loose, choking our creativity until we relent, consenting, in some cases, after much coercion. I call that a Renegade Muse, but you may know them by an inspirational bully of a different name.

What We Give Each Other

Thanks Wry, for giving us the space to grieve and process even the hard parts.