This Is A Prayer
This is a prayer
For My Son
One autumn morning, I kneel in a wilting fern grove.
Steam rises from decaying matter, lifts upward,
to where my clasped hands point—
pavilion of fingertips inside a prism of light.
O Sun, tent streaming through black-backed trees,
strengthen my trembling womb.
O Son, companion of dark caves who kicks and marches,
sojourns beneath my belly, be our sure-footed soldier.
I ask for nurturing, the bone-warming kind—
a mother with a dryer-heated blanket—
while I grow a life, your life, Given by God, in these woods.
Feet tired, I crumble, weep.
This earth is a lovely place.
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REFLECTION: the story behind the poem
I wrote this poem when I was five months pregnant—somewhere between the states of despair and hope. It was a time when I felt overwhelmed by sorrow and desperately clung to possibility.
It was October. I rose early one morning and walked into the woods, where I often go when I cannot name the polarities within me. I sank to my knees in grove of ferns matted down by an early frost. There was a softness in their decay, a beckoning, a blanket.
Silently, I prayed.
Within me was a tiny child, one whose kicks I had just started to feel. By that time, we had decided on a name for him, one that meant both soldier and Given by God. I knew him to be both: a practical, military-like energy that commanded me to put one foot in front of the other combined with the divine, stilling presence of that which is given.
I was tired and needing nurturing. I felt separated from my husband. I missed my mother and my aunt—the women who just knew what to do, where to be, how to say what needed to be said. I could not imagine mothering as an unsupported wife or a motherless mother.
And yet, there was the growing baby within me.
Tears streamed down my cheeks.
Below me, steam rose from the dead ferns.
Above me—beyond the horizon of my perceptions and through the silhouette of trees—the sun pierced through the inky morning.
A tent of light flooded over me.
*
That image, of sun streaming through trees, became a beacon for the rest of my pregnancy. It said, even though you don’t know how, everything will be okay.
It symbolized HOPE.
Shortly after the day in the fern grove, I hung a mural of the same image above the bed in which I slept during my pregnancy. Before dawn each morning, I would rise in the cave-like space a floor above where my husband slept. I would wrap myself in a blanket and sit in my mother’s old rocking chair. I welcomed the darkness as a place of active waiting, of gestation.
With one hand on my belly, I would watch the sun rise outside the window. When light cast a beam on the eastern wall, I would read the words of the prayer-poem aloud—to myself and to my son, my companion in darkness—just to hear the last line:
This earth is a lovely place.
