Deliverance Prayer

Deliverance Prayer

Nicole Rollender

Ancient, windswept women, we’re daughters of ritual &
blessed palm, my grandmother storying our
coal-haired grandmother in Poland who rode
dusky mares, wraiths between paradise the damned.
Eternal, their buried spines & pelvises yellowed,
faded relics, time holding us in the same fountain of
grace. Heal me from thinking my best days are gone.
Heal my father’s heart so he stays with us longer.
Intercede for me, Jude Thaddeus, saint of the desperate, from
judgment, when the Book of Consciences shows my life. The body’s
keel cracked in half as it rolls toward heaven. Lead me, blooming
lamb shaking among lilies. Save me, save my body from 
murderous lanternflies circling & chewing from all ages.
No, my night keeps opening in the finery of a wound.
Only God is there at the end of our unfurling. Let me
persevere the way of migrating flocks in hail, in flight. Every
question sounds like a voice murmuring gently in the next room.
Rest sounds like resist when I’m exhausted & won’t go down.
Shepherd me the way our grandmothers went — not by boat to those
underworlds green candled  & echoing every hurt we caused.
Verbum Dei, God’s Word, the before of now & after. Light from light.
Where there is no God, there’s no heaven. Soak my soul’s
xeric landscape so thrush & warblers return to its wakening trees.
Yoke me, an ox ready to furrow the fields & not look back. The sun’s
zenith pours sweat from my muscled back as I make my way home.

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Nicole Rollender
Poet

A 2017 NJ Council on the Arts poetry fellow, Nicole Rollender is the author of the poetry collections Louder Than Everything You Love and The Luster of Everything I'm Already Forgetting.  Her work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill Journal and West Branch. She earned her MFA in creative writing from The Pennsylvania State University.

Photography by Jeffrey Czum