Prayer by Marie Howe

Painting by our neighbor in Alaska. I think her name was Nancy Gilzean. The little girl is Mary Gilzean, her daughter, my playmate, Nicknamed “Boo.”

Prayer
by Marie Howe

Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention – the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage

I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here

among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.

The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?

My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.

Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.

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“Prayer” by Marie Howe, from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems. © WW Norton & Co. 2009

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I love “Help me.” My prayer. Over and over.

And “Why do I flee from you?”—that sounds like a Psalm.

And then “Even as I write these words I am planning to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.” I heard a sermon where the pastor referenced Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. It’s a book of letters from a “senior” devil, Screwtape, to a “junior” one, Wormwood. Screwtape is coaching Wormwood on how to tempt Christians. The pastor said one thing he advises is to keep them busy worrying about the future. That way they forget to see the gifts God has given them in the present. This line makes me think of that.