The Prayer

What we pray for

transcends to whom we pray.

Don’t bother

with a bow of head—a snowdrop’s

winter slump. Fingers interlacing

as a jigsaw. Kneeling in your pew?

It’s not the Via Dolorosa

after all.

It’s there within the fire

of your altar.

One face meaning more

than any other.

Wax is not a conduit

to heaven. It isn’t ease of burn—

it’s the freezing

rigor mortis of your sorrow.

Consider tear and tear.

Tell me which is mourning.

Which of them has torn 

your supplication—

in the twinkle it is rendered.

For this is the nature of

hope—pleading that the child

who’s just been shot

at St. René’s

is never yours. Foisting off the grief

like a baton. Misery is a torch

in lines of traffic. The car

that’s just ahead of you in

flames. For you miracolo—

for the Italian in his Fiat

a braid of fate.

Maybe the deities

pass the buck—Brama

to Allah, Jehovah

off to Zeus. Perhaps the lightning

strikes again, the mother beneath

the willow, while you have whimpered

help beneath the spruce,

its arms half-raised to shield.

It’s what you wanted,

no? A body going charcoal,

its embers wisping up to

deafened ears? The stench of

death & incense; a billion

blameless lambs that

long to bleed.

Andreas Gripp

November 3, 2026

photograph: Imagine Golf / Getty Images