Prayer Is Scrubbing
by Mia Anderson
Prayer is scrubbing a carrot with plastic bouclé bath-gloves on.
Prayer is another carrot, and another.
Prayer is opening the door to the mudroom and then the door
from there to the garden steps
and throwing the muddy water out into the leaky bucket.
Prayer works like the leaky bucket:
there’s an ‘is’ and an ‘ought’ but the ‘is’ takes precedence.
Prayer is standing at the other garden door after midnight
and breathing in the dark and
seeing someone’s white cat the White Cadger mid-stalk stand stock-
still in the middled night
and watch the watcher—and watch the watcher watch her,
another cadger cadging prayer bytes—
then stalk off into more dark, more garden, more bytes.
Prayer is dreaming that you asked if he had any time today,
the last day, for a chat,
and he confesses with alacrity but chagrin that he hasn’t,
and you have asked because
you are pretty sure this is the last time you will be on the same
continent, before the great divide.
And you are dreaming of Last Things. Prayer works like that.
Prayer is that sudden intimation that just perhaps you might
forgive the one you know best,
(who is that? you? him? the other?)
might find how to be able to let or might be empowered
(as they tediously say) to let at last the last
nearly midnight shadow of whatever it is that stands between
you and the shining carrot
shuffle off its muddy coil and let the soil cleanse it.
Prayer is soil.
Mia Anderson is a writer, an Anglican priest, a gardener, an erstwhile shepherd and a long-time actress. Her one-woman show 10 Women, 2 Men and a Moose showcased then-contemporary Canadian writers. She has published four books of poetry: Appetite (Brick, 1988), Château Puits ’81 (Oolichan, 1992), Practising Death (St Thomas’ Poetry, 1997), and most recently The Sunrise Liturgy (Wipf & Stock, 2012). Her Long Poems “The Saugeen Sonata” and “from The Shambles” have won awards.