Prayer
Nathan Parker
our Father I do love to walk
down to the shore at dawn
while the ground is cold
and there sprinkle my cells
to smashed ocean radios
I dream that I was born
with no tongue and that
I can neither ask nor
answer nor understand
questions about where
I come from that the waves
are my clapping sisters
so many dark swallowed
ships my deleted thoughts
cannon and coin pulp
my new body and that any
one of a million canyons
trembling with the psalms
of stones is my easily
remembered mother who
easily remembers me
About this poem
“A while ago I had a dream in which I was starving, bleeding, naked, and running from something. I ran for what felt like years, I was so afraid of the thing behind me. Near the end of the dream I collapsed in the middle of a dark and freezing neighborhood whose roads were lined with dead-bolted houses. I had run my legs down to the nubs…all I had left were these horror-show upper thighs. I dragged myself to multiple front doors in the neighborhood and knocked, but no one answered. In the last scene of the dream, I saw a light turn on in one little house. Before I even made it to the front door, a young woman in a white sweater came out and dragged my filthy body into her clean living room, covered me in a blanket by the fireplace, then laid my stink-bomb head in her lap. She ran her fingers through my hair and sang a song in an unrecognizable language. I died listening to the song, longing to understand it. When I woke up I wanted to write a poem about what ‘being claimed’ felt like, and what came out was ‘Prayer.'” – Nathan Parker
About Nathan Parker
Nathan Parker is the author of “The Locust Diagrams” (Noemi Press, 2015). He teaches at the University of Alabama and lives in Northport, Ala.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Nathan Parker. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org, Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
