Without A Prayer by Jerry Durick
Without a Prayer
“All we can do now is wait,” they say, but
there was a time when they would have said,
“All we can do now is pray,” but today we have
devalued prayer and thus are left with just
waiting, that void, that wasteland we fill with
possible scenarios, those imagined outcomes
we are full of, always ready to play out, pray out –
the doctor coming in to say it all went well, or he
says the opposite and things come tumbling down,
or finally your child is pulling in the driveway with
stories of why they are late, didn’t call, or the police
pull in and grief is written all over the moment –
our imaginings play out all the variations, the good
outcome, the bad; we fill in the blanks in our lives
with stories we hope for, with stories we dread, with
something that somehow seems like a prayer.
“All we can do now is wait,” they say, but
there was a time when they would have said,
“All we can do now is pray,” but today we have
devalued prayer and thus are left with just
waiting, that void, that wasteland we fill with
possible scenarios, those imagined outcomes
we are full of, always ready to play out, pray out –
the doctor coming in to say it all went well, or he
says the opposite and things come tumbling down,
or finally your child is pulling in the driveway with
stories of why they are late, didn’t call, or the police
pull in and grief is written all over the moment –
our imaginings play out all the variations, the good
outcome, the bad; we fill in the blanks in our lives
with stories we hope for, with stories we dread, with
something that somehow seems like a prayer.
J. K. Durick is a writing teacher at the Community College of Vermont and an online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in Social Justice Poetry, Tuck Magazine, Yellow Chair Review, Synchronized Chaos, and Haikuniverse.
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