Alfred Nicol
Midnight Prayer
Seul l’amour divin donne les clés de la connaissance.
—Arthur Rimbaud
My Lord, as you have given your consent
to the installation of a demagogue
at the highest magnitude of earthly power,
I guess it must be no concern of yours
who pulls the levers of this apparatus.
And as you have equipped the human heart
to feel attraction even where nobility
and grace are absent, so that people throng
to hear a vulgar man contort the language
taught them by their mothers, stripping it
of all significance to make of truth
a dancing bear, you must be sick to death
of hearing prayerful appeals to reason.
I do not question your benevolence;
I only ask, what question should I ask?
—Submitted on 09/26/2020
Alfred Nicol is the author of Brief Accident of Light: Poems of Newburyport (Kelsay Books, 2019), a collaboration with poet Rhina P. Espaillat; Animal Psalms (Able Muse Press, 2016); Elegy for Everyone (Prospero’s World Press, 2010), and Winter Light (University of Evansville Press, 2004), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award. Nicol’s work has appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, Dark Horse, Commonweal, The Hopkins Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Contemporary Poetry of New England (Middlebury, 2002), Obsession: Sestinas in the 21st Century (Dartmouth, 2014), and Best American Poetry 2018 (Scribner, 2018), among others.
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