Praying

Padraig J. Daly

I have been coming day on day
To seek You out,
Listening for Your voice,
Opening Your book of words,
Finding only tedium in Your company:

My soul is barren as the landscape of the moon.

Try as I might,
My mind will not stay
With God enfleshed; and plunging
Deeply into all our woe.

It hurtles out to the infinity of stars,
Striving to fathom the Naught and Other.

I, who live by words,
Parse Your mystery in words,
Read over and over the canonical books,

Know still You cannot be contained in word;
But are reached in useless sitting
And waiting till mayhap You visit me.

Like a bird that hops and flits
And claws the rotavated earth
My mind is, when I pray;

Or a cat sniffing at spoor under a hedge.

Some rivet themselves to You in prayer
Like ticks
While I dart like a bluebottle
And never settle.

I trust You still.
Love You?
Perhaps!
Who stand blankly beside me.

Yet how can I tell Your people who You are,
How You joy in us,
How You mop our tears,
When you show Yourself so fleetingly?

Either God is kind
And loves us in our failures;
Or God is not God.

I do not feel You near
When I kneel at the regulation times,
Light candles to conjure You,
Search the evangelical story.

But sometimes in a cleft in the clouds,
In the black fertility of a field,
In a bird’s note,
Your thereness overpowers me.

My prayer is a candle,
Abandoned at a shrine to splutter,

Or a Buddhist wheel,
Spinning the words,

While the mind goes on bye roads and boggy roads;
And never stills.

Are we no more than ants,
Frenzied and busy when someone lifts a stone;
Or are we wondrous moor-light,
Our tiniest actions sparking infinitely?

Pádraig J. Daly
Poet & Priest

Pádraig is a Dublin poet and Augustan priest whose most-recent poetry collection is A Small Psalter (Scotus Press).

Photography by Kevin Mueller

Ekstasis Magazine