"Prayer to be Still and Know" by Nickole Brown

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend Support Poem-a-Day October 24, 2019   Prayer to be Still and Know   Nickole Brown

Lord, let my ears go secret agent, each a microphone so hot it picks up things silent, reverbing even the hum of stone close to its eager, silver grill. Let my ears forget years trained to human chatter wired into every room, even those empty except of me, each broadcast and jingle tricking me into being less lonely than I am. Let my ears forget the clack and rumble, our tambourining and fireworking distractions, our roar of applause. Let my hands quit their clapping and rest in a new kind of prayer, one that doesn't ask but listens, palms up in my lap. Like an owl, let me triangulate icy shuffling under snow as vole, let me not just name the name when I spot a soundtrack of birdsong but understand the notes through each syrinx as a singular missive—begging, flirting, fussing, each companion call and alarm as sharp with desire and fear as my own. Prick my ears, Lord. Make them hungry satellites, have your way with their tiny bones, teach the drum within that dark to drum again. Because within the hammering of woodpecker is a long tongue unwinding like a tape measure from inside his pileated head, darting dinner from the pine's soft bark. And somewhere I know is a spider who births a filament of silk and flies it to the next branch; somewhere, a fiddlehead unstrings its violin into the miracle of fern. And somewhere, a mink not made into a coat cracks open a mussel's shell, and with her mouth full of that gray meat, yawns. Those are your sounds, are they not? Do not deny it, Lord, do not deny me. I do not know those songs. Nor do I know the hush a dandelion's face makes when it closes, surrenders, then goes to seed. No, I only know the sound my own breath makes as I wish and blow that perfect globe away; I only know the small, satisfactory popping of roots when I call it weed and yank it from the yard. There is a language of all you've created. Hear me, please. I just want to be still enough to hear. Right here, Lord: I want to be.             Copyright © 2019 by Nickole Brown. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 24, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets. About this Poem   "One of the great tragedies of this digital era is we've surrendered our senses to our devices, severing ourselves from our bodies with our clever thinking machines and their little glowing screens. So here, in this poem, I'm grieving what my own ears have lost, craving the language of animals and their home. Feeding this idea are two books integral to my current study of human-animal relationships: David George Haskell's The Songs of Trees and Jon Young's What the Robin Knows, both of which make the singular plea for humans to stop and listen hard to what the natural world is saying. At the center of this poem is an attempt to revise a particular cliché I've heard in more than one prayer circle, a distillation of Psalm 46:10 that neuters the text 'Be still, and know that I am God' into a platitude of comfort that suggests one need only relax to let the divine into your life. What's missing from that, however, is the context of this verse—'to be still' was no gentle suggestion but a command to stop fighting in a time of deep unrest and war—not unlike our world today, especially with such ecological devastation at hand. To me, the charge is not to step into nature to passively receive peace but to actively pay attention, and ultimately, to fight for something greater than ourselves." —Nickole Brown   Nickole Brown is the author of To Those Who Were Our First Gods (Rattle Foundation, 2018). She is on faculty at the Sewanee School of Letters low-residency MFA Program and lives in Asheville, North Carolina. Poetry by Brown   To Those Who Were Our First Gods (Rattle Foundation, 2018) "Square Cells" by Jenny Xie "The Radio Animals" by Matthea Harvey "What New Name" by Kazim Ali October Guest Editor: Oliver de la Paz   Thanks to Oliver de la Paz, author of five collections of poetry, including The Boy in the Labyrinth (University of Akron Press, 2019), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month's weekdays. Read a Q&A with Paz about his curatorial approach this month and find out more about our guest editors for the year. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit poets.org   Unsubscribe: here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038

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