The places we pray and lonely robots.

And a little Luci Shaw for us all.

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I’m still working on this poem I began this summer, in the Yukon. Sharing it unfinished for now.

With God

Naturally, 
when I walk this road,
I call on you. 
You have always met me here.

Today,
I travel further back
to when my prayers were young
and change was slow.

Before spring floods rotted the roots of the spruce glade.
Too much of a good thing,
leaving rust-brown tinder
for a future fire.

Before Janet had her stroke and lost her speech,
and Leroy his cancer battle.
The neighbors living in the blue house
don't say hello.

Before the porcupine rambled
up the hillside,
there were no loons on the lake
and the foxes had not dug their den. 

I call into the quiet
of the poplar thickets
and a new dog bounds out,
his joy the same.

Twenty years have walked
this way.
Yet here I am,
telling you everything again.

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Because everything deserves words:

“The entire universe is waiting to be written about, welcoming, opening its doors to reflection and understanding or attempts to enter mystery, even the disturbances of violence and ugliness and falsehood and broken promises. We live in such a changing, complex, intricately formed universe. Every part of it deserves to be brought to our attention.”

Luci Shaw (interviewed in Image Journal)

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And to rightly illustrate Luci’s thoughts, a poem to break your heart, about, of all things, the Mars rover.

There Is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier

by Matthew Rohrer

There is absolutely nothing lonelier
than the little Mars rover
never shutting down, digging up
rocks, so far away from Bond street
in a light rain. I wonder
if he makes little beeps? If so
he is lonelier still. He fires a laser
into the dust. He coughs. A shiny
thing in the sand turns out to be his.

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I’ll share more from the memoir project another time. Thanks, y’all.

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