prayer - carol anne duffy

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer --
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Duffy, Carol Anne. "Prayer" Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry. Peter Forbes, Ed. London: --Penguin Books, 1999. 494.

this given day - george elliott clarke

Morning yawns, the sun stretches, and the train
Pitches the air with smoke, paws the iron earth,
Tracks its big city game along the coast,
Narrows the span between our birth and death.
From dreams, we, depayses, fall to coffee,
Orange Free State oranges, new news, fresher dreams,
Prophesying what tomes were now must read,
What names we will need, what gods we will prize.
   All we can prove is the sun and the bay
And the baying hunter that is the train,
All joined in a beautiful loneliness --
Separated from our pure world of wounds,
Our globe of love (sharp nails hammered through palms),
Happening alone, as if it matters.

Clarke, George Elliott. "This Given Day" Modern Canadian Poets. Jones, Evan and Todd Swift, eds. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2010. 216.

night visit - robyn sarah

A woman in bed with a man and his dead father
is lonelier than a woman in bed alone,
for three's a crowd -- and face it, a dead man
weighs in to make a formidable other.
It is a son she holds now, not a lover:
flesh of his father's flesh, bone of his bone,
heart hurting with the unsaid and the undone --
a nakedness, but not hers to uncover.

She holds a son (not hers) whose difficult grieving
she cannot reach as wife, nor soothe as mother,
bound as it is to years she has not known.
What can she do but listen to his breathing,
stroke his cold brow, and wait for calmer weather,
allowing him this darkness for his own.

Sarah, Robyn. "Night Visit" Modern Canadian Poets. Jones, Evan and Todd Swift, eds. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2010. 182.

variation on the word sleep - margaret atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping,

which may not happen.

I would like to watch you,

sleeping. I would like to sleep

with you, to enter

your sleep as its smooth dark wave

slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent

wavering forest of bluegreen leaves

with its watery sun & three moons

towards the cave where you must descend,

towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver

branch, the small white flower, the one

word that will protect you

from the grief at the center

of your dream, from the grief

at the center I would like to follow

you up the long stairway

again & become

the boat that would row you back

carefully, a flame

in two cupped hands

to where your body lies

beside me, and as you enter

it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air

that inhabits you for a moment

only. I would like to be that unnoticed

& that necessary.

 

Atwood, Margaret. "Variation on the Word Sleep" The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1982.

the way we live - kathleen jamie

Pass the tambourine, let me bash out praises
to the Lord God of movement, to Absolute
non-friction, flight, and the scary side:
death by avalanche, birth by failed contraception.
Of chicken tandoori and reggae, loud, from tenements,
commitment, driving fast and unswerving
friendship. Of tee-shirts on pulleys, giros and Bombay,
barmen, dreaming waitresses with many fake-gold
bangles. Of airports, impulse, and waking to uncertainty,
to strip-lights, motorways, or that pantheon --
the mountains. To overdrafts and grafting

and the fit slow pulse of wipers as you're
creeping over Rannoch, while the God of moorland
walks abroad with his entourage of freezing fog,
his bodyguard of snow.
Of endless gloaming in the North, of Asiatic swelter,
to launderettes, anecdotes, passions and exhaustion,
Final Demands and dead men, the skeletal grip
of government. To misery and elation; mixed,
the sod and caprice of landlords.
To the way it fits, the way it is, the way it seems
to be: let me bash out praises -- pass the tambourine.

Jamie, Kathleen. "The Way We Live" Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry. Peter Forbes, Ed. London: --Penguin Books, 1999. 481-2.