Monday Prayers (For Beginnings)

At every beginning
bless our dreaming
and our doing.

This day (week, month, year) lies before us,
full of the mundane and the miraculous,
the known and the unknown.

Be the breath we take before each step.
Be the source from which we draw strength.
Be the end toward which we direct our hope.

Open our eyes to all that is around us.
Open our ears to the song the soul yearns to sing.
Open our hearts to the love that lives through us,
Open our hands to the task the moment requires.

Let us do the one thing,
the thing before us,
as if all creation
and out very life
depend upon it,

as if You are bent over,
watching and listening
and willing us
to do it well.

--Carla A. Grosch-Miller,  from Psalms Redux: Poems and Prayers, 2017

a man who had fallen among thieves

a man who had fallen among thieves 
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat

fate per a somewhat more than less
emancipated evening
had in return for consciousness
endowed him with a changeless grin

whereon a dozen staunch and leal
citizens did graze at pause
then fired by hypercivic zeal
sought newer pastures or because

swaddled with a frozen brook
of pinkest vomit out of eyes
which noticed nobody he looked
as if he did not care to rise

one hand did nothing on the vest
its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
while the mute trouserfly confessed
a button solemnly inert.

Brushing from whom the stiffened puke
i put him all into my arms
and staggered banged with terror through
a million billion trillion stars.

--e. e. cummings (1894-1962), American poet, painter, and playwright



Scriptural Reference: Luke 10:25-37 (Proper 10C)

Image: Vincent Van Gogh, The Good Samaritan

Connection

A hawk touches down
                  the humming earth before Miami,
                                                                         Oklahoma.
              You old Shawnee, I think
                                                  of your rugged ways
                      the slick-floored bars and whiskey
                        sour nights when the softer heart
                                                                             comes apart.
The Spokane you roam isn't City of the Angels
          but another kind of wilderness.
              You speed in a Ford truck and it's five
                  in the morning, the sun and dogs
                                                                      only ones up
and you go home to red earth
                                            when you see a hawk
               crossing wires

                                       touching down.

-- Joy Harjo (1951- ), Muscogee (Creek) American, US Poet Laureate 2019- . musician and artist, from She Had Some Horses, 1983.