Verbal prayers

I define myself as a poet and a writer, but I usually experience prayer as something unspoken. I suspect no one knows as well as a poet how faulty words can be. In each poem, I can insert and retract word after word, and each has its own shade of meaning. Seldom am I certain that a word is either perfect or precise.

Almost never does a word—a collection of letters and sounds that we agree mean a particular thing—communicate exactly what I’d like to say. Even with these failings, the poems I write are my verbal prayers. Their words attempt to reach for truth and insight; in them, I’m looking for answers.

This message is an excerpt from “Not every prayer ends with ‘Amen’” by Karen Craigo in the June 2018 issue of Gather magazine.  

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