...from the sieve of her hands...

Sorry haven't been here for a while. Trying to go forwards...Work and life keeping me busy. Hope you are all well and using up the last of the year well. During the week I got onto a tube in London feeling very tired and despondent, as you often do cramming onto a tube at rush hour, wondering if I had taken a backwards step in my life, and without a book to read, swinging tiredly from the hand rail above me, I stared mindlessly up at the adverts. Among them was this poem. It is called 'Prayer' and was almost in answer to one in that moment, and was so lovely I thought I'd put it here. I hope you think so too...

PRAYER - Carol anne Duffey

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre

(It would be enough wouldn't it... to write something like that. Even just once... 'the truth enters our hearts, that small familiar pain...', '...Then dusk, and someone calls a child's name as though they named their loss.')