Praying
Connie Jordan Green

Praying

Dear Spirit that hides in the kitchen cupboard,
inhabits the soup pot, clatters among the unwashed
dishes, you are the air that dries my sheets
on the clothesline, the mist that moistens
the clematis vine climbing the garden fence,
the breath on the back of my neck,
the squeak on the attic stairs.

I bend my knee to the steady drone
of your demands, to the way bone and body
move through a day, the promise of morning
and resignation of evening. Where you abide
is my cathedral, smudged windows
my stained glass, vacuum cleaner humming
a hymn, my children’s faces an open prayer book,

our lives a sacrament we celebrate each holy day—
baptism, marriage, death, the small
rituals of becoming and being,
sunflower into seed for winter birds,
grass into hay, all that grows flowering
and seeding, dying into rising, new vine, new leaf.

Connie Jordan Green

lives with her husband and several cats and dogs on a farm in Loudon County, Tennessee. She writes a newspaper column, poetry, and young adult novels (The War at Home and Emmy). She has two chapbooks, Slow Children Playing and Regret Comes to Tea, both from Finishing Line Press, and two full-length collections: Household Inventory, winner of the Brick Road Poetry Press Award, and Darwin's Breath.