Chalk Songs

Chalk Songs

Christian Wiman

1. Cutting Enough

A time cutting enough to reawaken
some original instinct of prayer.
When the turn to words is a form of sloth.

2. Little Inscription for the Family Bible

The liars and the testifiers and the martyrs of water.

Thaddeus, Theta, bonecancered Carla,
who went out screaming being like an inverted birth.

Let us say a word for all those who died of God,
their hearts, we hope, a little lighter now without us in them.

3. Little Flames

We blinked out.

One by one,
grief by grief,

we who had kept you
you

blinked out.
You grew

into the spaces
between us

until you were as everywhere
as a gas leak.

One real prayer
would set the sky on fire.

4. Somewhere This Side of Sanity

Somewhere this side of sanity
let me have one glimpse of you God.

I have grown tired of gazing at the seams in things,
believing that there are seams in things,

that all reality is ventilated with an absence
that both is and annihilates vision.

If prayer then prayer to be free of the need for it.
If renunciation then of the need to renounce.

To stand neither bored nor alarmed
looking out on your life

like a child’s chalk-drawing a child watches
washed away by a storm.

---

Christian Wiman
Poet & Author

Chrisian is a poet, the former editor of Poetry Magazine, and Author of Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, along with many other books.

Photography by Luke Stackpoole