A Prayer On Your Wires March 2020

It is the first day of spring. The gods have delivered inches of snow. A thin line of crocus stalks are teeming at the edge of a flagstone. Life is holding to a stationary orbit but struggling. A minister posted she would pray each morning and asked: How can I pray for you? This is a human prayer.

A Prayer on Your Wires
copyright 2020, Vincent Hostak

From the end of a copper wire
then the air
a minister’s voice signals
“For Whom Should I Pray, Today?
Leave Your Comment. 
I Will Speak Them.”
Today?
For those I will not visit
for their safety
not a casual breath will pass.
For the cashier, who’s fingernails
are each a different glossy hue
clutching the currency passed
and bagging the beans and milk.
For the letter carrier, we forgot, still
distributes our gratitude,
our well wishes
quiet from a large world,
to dull colored mail drops.
For the peace officer by the phone,
the cook and expediter
whose holy eyes scan
curls of braising cabbage,
whose hands wrap parchment,
box a gift to nourish.
A teacher reworking
what was already troubled once
to make it small enough
to travel cables,
arrive total and rich
to a still new mind.
The doctor, nurse
upon the sixteenth hour,
i hope not to see you,
but to hear your breath
singing  of sweet sleep
from miles away.
Even from this isolation,
your every movements
stir air around us
in ways we can’t ignore
it whistles with your hope
whirrs with your industry
is scripted with your courage
and encoded with your devotion.
we have chosen to see only shortages
and you have shown us abundance.

Published by Vincent Hostak

I am a father, writer, and podcaster living along the Front Range, Colorado. My poetry has appeared in Sonder Midwest, Tejascovido, Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, Texas Poetry Assignment and the 2022-23 print anthology, Lone Star Poetry: Championing Texas Verse, Community, and Hunger Relief. I produce The Phantom Script (a poetry podcast) and Crossings-the Refugee Experience in America Podcast. https://www.kallistogaiapress.org/product/lone-star-poetry-championing-verse-community-and-hunger-relief/

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