It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
“Praying” isn’t exactly a prayer, though the title, artfully ambiguous, suggests that pausing to reflect on praying is itself an act of praying. The poem reminds me of how prayer overlaps with one’s own interior monologue—the “self-talk” that includes hopeful affirmations, recitations of what one knows and needs to reclaim, words from the inner teacher who occasionally alerts us to what we didn’t know we knew. Sometimes we pull words out of deep memory banks, where we store them for moments of need. Sometimes they come from elsewhere—from the Spirit who guides us and addresses us in ways few of us have learned fully to acknowledge.
These words come from a collection published during a period of great personal loss for the poet. They seem, in that context, to extend comfort: grief brings exhaustion; it is hard to pray one’s way through the dailiness of sorrow. But prayer is a gentle task, and may, if we keep it mercifully simple, heal our hearts almost effortlessly.
The opening phrase, “It doesn’t have to be . . . ,” introduces the business of praying in terms of permission. Longtime readers of Oliver’s poetry will recognize in it an echo of the opening line of her poem “Wild Geese”: “You do not have to be good.” The words release us from imperatives and moralistic constraints that may be impeding the very freedom required to enter into a state of grace and a dialogue with the Divine Listener.
Anything—weeds, small stones—can occasion that grace. Though the blue iris may move us with its delicacy, the depth of its color, or a symmetry and complexity of form we have learned to call beautiful, prayerful awareness doesn’t depend on beauty—at least not on beauty defined by aesthetic conventions. Good photographers know how often a weed or a stone might become a key element in a composition that surprises the eye and mind into a sudden apprehension of radiance in what might ordinarily be overlooked. Openness to such incidental beauty, sudden reframings that transform the ordinary and even the “ugly,” is a matter of both willingness and practice.
The practice of noticing opens the heart to gratitude and leads, at least for this poet and for many who pray, to an impulse to address the Source of what has been seen. So we “patch a few words together,” words sometimes spontaneous, sometimes learned by heart and carried there for ready use when the heart is turned to prayer. Either is sufficient.
While visiting a 98-year-old hospice patient, I was moved to learn that he had recited every night since the age of six the simple German prayer his mother had taught him. He was a highly educated professional, a man of some sophistication and broad interests and tastes. But the childhood prayer—really just a few simple words patched together for a child’s sleepy recitation—still served him in a way that was not simply sentimental. After reciting it for me, he told me how it had kept him in touch with Jesus through many hard times when he might have been driven away from God altogether.
He was grateful. And he had nothing to prove. That prayer—along, doubtless, with others he devised and discovered in adult life—kept a doorway open that led him to the thanks he readily expressed and perhaps also, even on his last night, into the silence where he could hear God’s voice.
The line breaks in “Praying” reinforce its message—a strong corrective to the harmful anxieties that make prayer an unsettling or unappealing venture. Immediately following the permission given in “It doesn’t have to be,” we are offered possibility: “it could be.” And only “a few” will suffice: pausing on “a few,” we’re invited to recognize that whatever it is that occasions the prayer of the heart, it doesn’t take much to move from observation to encounter. My favorite line break comes after “don’t try.” It’s hard not to try—to open and allow rather than making the effort that leads, after all, to scrupulosity and spiritual pride or frustration. Prayers, even the most elegant, begin here—in receiving, allowing, humbling, patching, entering into a place that has been provided, and listening.