Deliver us, O Truth, O Love, from quiet prayer
from polite and politically correct language,
from appropriate gesture and form
and whatever else we think we must put forth to invoke
or to praise You.

Let us instead pray dangerously –
wantonly, lustily, passionately.
Let us demand with every ounce of our strength,
let us storm the gates of heaven, let us shake up ourselves
and our plaster saints from the sleep of years.

Let us pray dangerously.
Let us throw ourselves from the top of the tower,
let us risk a descent to the darkest region of the abyss,
let us put our head in the lion’s mouth
and direct our feet to the entrance of the dragon’s cave.

Let us pray dangerously.
Let us not hold back a little portion,
dealing out our lives–our precious minutes and our energies–like some efficient accountant.
Let us rather pray dangerously — unsafe, profligate, wasteful!

Let us ask for nothing less than the Infinite to ravage us.
Let us ask for nothing less than annihilation in the
Fires of Love.

Let us not pray in holy half-measures nor walk
the middle path
for too long,
but pray madly, foolishly.
Let us be too ecstatic,
let us be too overwhelmed with sorrow and remorse,
let us be undone, and dismembered…and gladly.

Left to our own devices, ah what structures of deceit
we have created;
what battlements erected, what labyrinths woven,
what traps set for ourselves, and then
fallen into. Enough.

Let us pray dangerously — hot prayer, wet prayer, fierce prayer,
fiery prayer, improper prayer,
exuberant prayer, drunken and completely unrealistic prayer.

Let us say Yes, again and again and again.
and Yes some more.
Let us pray dangerously,

the most dangerous prayer is YES. 

    - Regina Sara Ryan​

​Because one must be naked to get clean,
my dad shrugs out of his pajama shirt,
steps from his boxers and into the tub
as I brace him, whose long illness
has made him shed modesty too.
Seated on the plastic bench, he holds
the soap like a caught fish in his lap,
waiting for me to test the water’s heat
on my wrist before turning the nozzle
toward his pale skin. He leans over
to be doused, then hands me the soap
so I might scrub his shoulders and neck,
suds sluicing from spine to buttock cleft.
Like a child he wants a washcloth
to cover his eyes while I lather
a palmful of pearlescent shampoo
into his craniotomy-scarred scalp
and then rinse clear whatever soft hair
is left. Our voices echo in the spray
and steam of this room where once,
long ago, he knelt at the tub’s edge
to pour cups of bathwater over my head.
He reminds me to wash behind his ears,
and when he judges himself to be clean,
I turn off the tap. He grips the safety bar,
steadies himself, and stands. Turning to me,
his body is dripping and frail and pink.
And although I am nearly forty,
he has this one last thing to teach me.
I hold open the towel to receive him.

​    - Amy Fleury

What if we enter each day
so silently, so seamlessly
the birds don't sound alarms and dart away,
our minds so well released from fits of thought
we are kin to all that breathes,
like grazing deer
hidden in dapples of green

O how we would walk then
light hoofed and elfin eyed, even on crowded days,
each trembling leaf a welcome
Silky beating wings
would cool our errant fevers of mind
would keep us filled with awe
and kind

​    - Cynthia Poten

​I acknowledge my status as a stranger:   
Inappropriate clothes, odd habits   
Out of sync with wasp and wren.   
I admit I don’t know how   
To sit still or move without purpose.   
I prefer books to moonlight, statuary to trees.   

But this lawn has been leveled for looking,   
So I kick off my sandals and walk its cool green.   
Who claims we’re mere muscle and fluids?   
My feet are the primitives here.   
As for the rest—ah, the air now   
Is a tonic of absence, bearing nothing   
But news of a breeze.

​    - Rita Dove

​I was at the window
when a fly near the latch
was on its back spinning--
legs furious, going nowhere.

I thought to swat it
but something in its struggle
was too much my own.

It kept spinning and began to tire.
Without moving closer, I exhaled
steadily, my breath a sudden wind
and the fly found its legs,
rubbed its face
and flew away.

I continued to stare at the latch
hoping that someday, the breath
of something incomprehensible
would right me and
enable me to fly.

​    - Mark Nepo

​for Luna

It was late afternoon and we were standing
on the deck overlooking the gray swath
of the Pacific, when my friends’ daughter,
then four, turned to me and pointed at the hawks
flying in the distance. I can call them if I want,
she said, tilting back her head to let out a long,
fierce caw, which floated up over the marsh
and above the trees. At first, nothing. Then--
a slash in the distance. And in the next moment
there it was—nearly above us, wings spread wide,
the color of rust. And then, another, the two floating
in silent circles while she sounded her cries.
The primal cry of the human, raw and plain.
The call to prayer, the weeping at the wall,
the singer’s highest, most broken, note.
Whatever it is we send up into oblivion, waiting.
Haven’t I, too, called out? Haven’t I beseeched
something winged to do my bidding?
And here she was, calling, and here they came,
in answer, this hinged assembly, hovering
toward us on the wind. Ten? Twenty?
Enough to darken the heavens above
where we stood, weighted in place, pinned
by a cover of raptors. Bone swallowers,
snake eaters, sharp-sighted angels of prey,
their scaled feet clutching the empty sky.

​    - Danusha Lameris

​​Be like a bear in the forest of yourself.
Even sleeping you are powerful in your breath.
Every hair has life
and standing, as you do, swaying
from one foot to the other
all the forest stands with you.
Each minute sound, one after another,
is distinct in your ear. Here
in the blur of mixed sensations, you can
feel the crisp outline of being, particulate.
Great as you are, huge as you are and
growling like the deepest drum,
the continual vibration that makes music
what it is,
not some light stone skipped on the surface of things,
you travel below
sounding the depths where only the dauntless go.
Be like the bear and
do not forget
how you rounded your
massive shape over the just ripened
berry which burst
in your mouth that moment
how you rolled in
the wet grass, cool and silvery, mingling
with your sensate skin,
how you shut
your eyes and swam far and farther
still, starlight
shaping itself to your body,
starship rocking the grand, slow waves
under the white trees, in the
snowy night.

    - Susan Griffin

​It was as if a window suddenly blew open
and the sky outside the mind came flooding in.
My childhood shriveled to a close,
just like that, thread of smoke
that rose and touched a cloud - or the cloud’s
replica adrift on the slow river of thinking -
and disappeared inside it. In that dark water,
a new lily was opening, sky-white out of the muck.
It was only a glimpse, quick,
like a bird ruffling,
but I saw the flower’s
beautiful stark shape, an artichoke
brightened from within by the moon.
A path lay shadowy under my feet,
and I followed it.

    - Chase Twichell