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

Soleil & Sons, by Robert Cording

Addressed to God, this poem of thanks begins in awe of the ordinary: the strawberries, the tea, the toast, the baker. Then it goes on to bigger, possibly Biblical, things: loaves, sons, the good news.

The softer sounds -- strawberries, cinnamon, sun, Soleil -- create a quietly comfortable homage to the devotional poems of English priest George Herbert, in themselves little miracles.

Soleil & Sons

I have been reading your better servantGeorge Herbert again, and I’m trying to turnmy day into prayer, praying as the toast riseswith the toaster’s tinny bell and the tea leavesturn water into English Breakfast tea,and praying as I slice strawberries and addtheir redness to a bowl of granola.I’m grateful this morning for this cinnamon toastand for the local baker who made it, and forthe French word for sun and the punning nameof the bakery, and for the sun that arrivedthis morning without my asking.Soleil and Sons, Soleil and Sons, Soleil and Sons,why not add those words to my prayer,the glass of my watch making a small sunof the actual sun that forks and dartsalong the walls and across the ceiling, multiplyinglike those five loaves, like sun and sons.Maybe this is how Herbert’s prayer became an elixirthat carried the whole, given ordinary dayinside it, his entire body feelingas if it could break into applause for nothingmore than the floor he swept clean for thy sake,nothing explaining the way love took holdon its own. And maybe I’m beginningto get it, this keeping you nearwith my words, and maybe the good news isjust saying the words over and over,a prayer that somehow keeps gratitudein mind even when it doesn’t.
Published in SalamanderFall/Winter 2017-18

Respond. I'll be grateful.