Prayer - Tonijean Bernbaum

[Lawrence Robinson]

Prayer

It really doesn’t matter
Where I begin 
or how it begins.
It could be a tulip in its last day of bloom
or a baby pine sprinkled with snow
or a walnut in its shell 
or a stone from the river bed at a sacred site.

It could be a chipmunk
or the scurrying of a chipmunk
on the pile of fresh cut oak
fragrant in the peripheral 
of dawn’s first light.
Could be the deer
eating the apple
or the deer dung
or the emerald patch of moss
where the dung was dropped.

I find it quite impossible 
to begin a prayer.
It’s already going on 
All the time
everywhere.

     - Tonijean Bernbaum