Prayer, by Natalia Toledo

A proffering about the value of being present for the smallest of particulars of one's particular life. It's a quiet and content poem that's not self-consciously a poem.

Prayer

For my grandmother’s wheelchair,

for my friend Candida’s green mangoes.

For houses made of brick,

their damp vermillion.

For the gray slats of my cradle,

for spiny cacti

growing on the walls.

For the jicalpextles my mother

got from other people’s weddings.

For those days when the sun burnished my hair

and my smile was the blinding bright of a salt crust.

For the photographs stuck to a piece of cardboard,

their swift migration to our family altar.

For the petate and its map of urine stains,

for the twisted trees upon the rippled water.

For all that I made into a life.

I sing.

2019

Translation from the Zapotec and Spanish by Irma Pineda and Clare Sullivan