Barren Prayers

Barren prayers lie like a crumbling edifice interrupting
a sweeping green glade--lie chipped, cracked, and echoing in abandoned emptiness
as a forgotten abbey: vine-grown, encompassed in weeds and earth,
nested with birds and mice. Walls detach from roof, roof from shingle,

A door hangs by a single hinge. The stone wall of the abbey garden crumbles,
moss-covered and grass-covered, just a tracing slope above the turf.
Beside, worn headstones, etched with a cross, mark unremembered tombs.
Quaintly pastoral to an observing eye:

Almost serene, a photo-stop to cross off the sightseer's itinerary.
But the barren prayer heaves with life
like the barren tomb, and what was dead comes alive and enters
the locked and barred room, baring its scars to show its death

and prove it's no phantom risen, but flesh and blood anew--
having passed through the darkening river of death, parted
its waters, trampled its dry and stony depths to stand
now upon the eastern shore.

And he is dead whose prayers
must always be said only on the shores of living water.