Prayer For Turning

by Sally Rosen Kindred

Let me forget everything but the lace
              in the mirror’s tremor.
Let me move away from the dress’s time
              and the brush and comb
and even my own face, my mother’s face curled
              like a child inside it. 
Let me enter the silver tree that does not know
              how we die and though
I may learn to stretch into its wood-spun skin, 
              soften my body into its raw 
quiet body of air, let me not take
              its memory, not make its green singing mine.

Only let me turn from the flat shine of my own tongue. 

It is time now to give my name
              to the sparrows in the brittle leaves.
It is time to follow their veins
              into strange ribbon and blood,
the place where my mother and my father
              did not yet know they were
but they were, the time of moons and moss that was
              more a place, a ladder black as a branch
climbing and naming up to the cold home stars.
              Let my silence name and climb me like bright ice:

shuddering up, doubt-wet, into You.

::

Sally Rosen Kindred’s third poetry collection is Where the Wolf (Diode Editions), winner of the Diode Book Contest and the 2021 Julie Suk Award. She is also the author of No Eden and Book of Asters (Mayapple Press), and the chapbook Says the Forest to the Girl (Porkbelly Press). Her poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review MiCRos, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and Kenyon Review Online. She teaches workshops for the Poetry Barn.

Image: Gary Ellis

ID: Water droplet clings to moss.