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The Atheist’s Art of Prayer
it was the day
my oldest friend left
for war
that i began learning
the atheist’s art
of prayer.
having no-one to speak to,
I don’t.
—no pleas,
no bargians
(my good behavior
for her life)
and no hope that I might be heard—
just the bright burning in my heart,
my hands clasped tight to contain it,
—while across the world
she speaks in tongues
and loses weight steadily, rapidly,
until in her photos I can see only her skeleton
peering through the face I used to know—
just my legs, buckled beneath me
and knees bruised
at the weight of it,
—no favors,
no reasoning,
and no hope that I might be heard—
just the insensate laws of cause
and effect, of motion and time and chance,
just the desperate,
helpless, and involuntary feeling
of please.
Caitlin Gildrien is a writer, farmer and sometime donut-walla in Middlebury, Vermont. She blogs at Up!
Smoke
Form is illusion.
Ask any monk. Ask any moth.
Ask anybody who’s lost
what they thought defined them.
Form is built
from the outside in.
Lose your legs.
You are not your legs.
Lose your job.
You are not your job.
Lose your love.
Take fire,
for instance.
Take all that carbon
and snap those bonds.
Freed of form,
it turns pure energy. Heat.
Turns an oak into a torch,
into a column of smoke;
after all that wood, all those leaves,
all that living, you’d be hard-pressed
to tell its ashes
from the squirrel’s.
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