The Nature of Prayer

(The Church at Auvers by Vincent Van Gogh - found here)

                 (a debt to Van Gogh’s “Crooked Church”)

Maybe a mad fit made you set it there

Askew, bent to the wind, the blue-print gone

Awry, or did it? Isn’t every prayer

We say oblique, unsure, seldom a simple one,

Shaken as your stone tightening in the air?

Decorum smiles a little. Columns, domes

Are sights, are aspirations. We can’t dwell

For long among such loftiness. Our homes

Of prayer are shaky and, yes, parts of Hell

Fragment the depths from which the great cry comes.

~Elizabeth Jennings