Looking for Answers
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed
—Mary Oliver
Yesterday’s walk—fish scale clouds.
Three woodpeckers calling loud,
flying tree to tree following one another.
What do you call a trio of good-omen birds in flight?
What do we name these clouds scaling through sky
in scalloped arcs like the shimmery
flat side of an ocean dwelling fish?
What do you call the feeling
when everything seems akimbo and in limbo;
really neither here nor there.
Almost to spring, yet temperatures still plummet
turning snowmelt to ice.
Almost at war; the world on edge.
Pandemic ravishes in places; is calming down in others.
Folks don’t know what to do—mask and distance,
or step back to “normal.”
I’ve fallen out of practice how to gather;
have settled back into hermitic ways,
finding comfort in aloneness;
unease at the thought of “in-person.”
What do we call it, to feel lost
in the midst of every day; in the midst of your life;
your precious life.
—Submitted on 09-17-22
Marjorie Moorhead is the author of the chapbooks Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and Survival Part 2 Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Verse-Virtual, Sheila-Na-Gig, Amethyst Review, Moist Poetry, Tiny Seed Journal, Bloodroot Literary, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies, including Support Ukraine (Moonstone Arts, 2022) and Covid Spring II (Hobblebush Books, 2021). Her full-length debut, Every Small Breeze, is forthcoming from Indolent Books.
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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
