My friend, I want to ask you: are you all at sea?
I feel I’m swimming bodiless through a drowned world.
You’re screened from me, busy fruitless days between us.
This home feels cavernous, the long table empty.
I want to ask: can we read aloud together
some ancient verse or prose—or maybe even sing?
You bring your yarn and needles; I’ll pour a good wine.
What are you reading these days to save your own soul?
Do you know a liturgy for chopping fresh herbs?
Will you pray it for me while we work together?
Is there one for withdrawing from the bits and bytes
that order our lives? For saying no to it all:
deleting accounts, materializing back
into the flesh of life—present and almost whole?
Or one for naming the chest’s weight, the brain’s vapor?
Is there a path that leads back to silence? A prayer
to surface ancestral memory, or coax neurons
back to life? And why am I homesick for highlands
I’ve never even seen? And tell me what to pray
when crying in the shower for a fading son
who’s receding from us like the tide. And why this
lament for seeding grass over the back garden?
What is this urge to bend and kneel? And why seasons—
how do I let them billow full, then fade away?
I’m trying to learn wintering: white, gray, muffled words,
the early dark, settling in, hunkering down.
Will you learn wintering with me—by the fireplace
or by the lake in the frozen dawn; in the door
of my son’s room, hunting a sign he’ll re-cohere?
Do words exist that might accomplish all of this?
Some days I find myself wishing I’d learned Latin,
or even Greek—those ancient, effectual tongues.
I remember the kyrie, and a little
Aramaic: Eloi, lama sabachthani?
Rachel E. Hicks’s poetry has appeared in Presence, Anglican Theological Review, Vita Poetica, The Baltimore Review, The Windhover, Relief, and other journals. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she also won the 2019 Briar Cliff Review Fiction Prize.
