Saturday, February 28, 2009

Cairns on Answers to Prayer

Possible Answers to Prayer
by Scott Cairns

Your petitions—though they continue to bear
just the one signature—have been duly recorded.
Your anxieties—despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent
entertainment value—nonetheless serve
to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance—all but obscured beneath
a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more
conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,
the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes
recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly
righteous indignation toward the many
whose habits and sympathies offend you—

these must burn away before you’ll apprehend
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.


From here.

3 comments:

Scott Cairns said...

Hey, thanks for posting the poem, but it's written in tercets, right? Why not post it as written?

Thanks,
Scott

Alice C. Linsley said...

Scott, I'll fix it. This happens sometimes when I copy and paste and forget to check the HTML format.

Best wishes,
Alice

Scott Cairns said...

Very nice! Thanks, sistah!

S.