A Year of Prayers

By Jack Bartlett

The 365 poems in this collection, one for every day of the year, are a journey through prayer. The objective of the poems is to serve as an accompaniment to prayer, silently, in the form of a verse. The initial inspiration of these writings was from the Psalms, but there is referenced material throughout the Scriptures, as well as events that occurred in history and in the author's daily life. With only a few exceptions, the prayer/poems are not date specific, denomination specific, or even specific to the author only, but to everyone. The poems speak of subjects such as faith, death, nature, freedom, love, beauty, and history. Each poem is intended to be able to stand on its own, independent of the others. These poems are unique in that they are prayers first, poems second, and could be considered daily devotions, spiritual meditations, or as a resource for pastors of all Christian denominations. They are written so that they could also be "crossover" poetry, and could be attractive to secular tastes as well.

The monumental task of writing this many poems brought the author's attention to prayer itself, and to the nature of artistic expression, which cannot be forced, but must come of its own. The succeeding "visitations" of the ideas or inspirations gave reason to believe that, not surprisingly, the author had help from the very ONE being written to, and about.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jun 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781630879679

Jack Bartlett

Jack Bartlett is a Professor Emeritus of Mississippi State University. He has one book of poetry published, Colors, published in 2001. He is also a painter of landscapes and the natural world.

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A Year of Prayers

Jack Bartlett

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A Year of Prayers

Copyright © 2011 Jack Bartlett. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

ISBN 13: 978-1-61097-337-3

EISBN 13: 978-1-63087-967-9

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

Dedicated to my loving wife, Sandra.

Foreword

Th e two oldest books in this author’s personal library are a King James Bible given to me when I was a teenager, and a tattered copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The Bible was my first book and had been a gift from my sister. Whitman’s masterpiece I obtained as a freshman in college. These two books were among the first that I owned and they influenced me significantly, the Bible because it was, well, the Bible, and Leaves of Grass because it spoke so much about nature, about the joy and wonder of realization, both of the self and the glorious natural world.

Through my years as a painter of outdoor landscapes, I continued in my interest of poets who addressed the subject of nature and beauty, especially Wordsworth, Frost, and Keats. I became a joyous reader of poetry, particularly those poets whose works used the sound of words and phrases that magnified a sentence rather than merely described an event or feeling; poets like Wallace Stevens, ee. cummings, Theodore Roethke, and especially, Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Blake.

In Hopkins I saw a merging of my own interests in word play, importance of nature, rhythm, and most of all, faith. In most of the poets I read, however, I found scant efforts to unite verse with Scripture, in fact, almost an avoidance of it.

With my faith growing more and more as I grew older, I developed an interest in trying to merge faith and Scripture with verse in some fashion, beginning with poetic salutations to nature and making an effort to elicit my faith as a witness to it. I concluded from my personal reading that there was not enough poetry written that could stand on its own equally as poetry and devotion. There was certainly no shortage of visual artists like Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Tanner and, yet again, William Blake, who had expressed great Scriptural reference in their works. I decided to embark on such a challenging task to combine the two interests, poetry and prayer. I undertook the task of writing and collecting 365 poems that were also prayers, and was humbled and sometimes thought I would never complete all of them.

There were other motives at work in writing this collection of prayer/poems. At the end of the 20th Century I became aware that more than a new century and millennium was nearing. Considering the cultural history of the first ten years of the 20th Century, when all assumptions old and pre-modern were reassessed, in the late 1990’s I wondered if the time had come to do the same with the century then ending. I assumed that a similar reassessment of modernism would begin, so I began my own personal evaluations, as much as I could. I planned to examine the cultural and spiritual nostrums of the century, and I considered it my duty to be critical. Of course, anyone could agree that the 20th Century produced the greatest advances in human life expectancy, technology and quality of life, at least in terms of comfort, in the history of mankind. I was convinced that 1999, in many ways, was more unlike 1899 than 1899 was to 899. I also speculated that the last century may have lost as much as it gained, and its most damaging loss was the loss of faith. It saddened me to learn that over 100 million people had been killed in that century by generally those who had left God out of the human equation. These facts were very revealing, and to me, cast suspicion over the nature of our entire recent past. This century needed a hard critique that had seldom been forthcoming, and the postmodern culture we now find ourselves in should have been called the postponing culture, one that to me had either denied or postponed the obvious, that indeed mankind is incapable of living without God.

So I began collecting my own prayers in search of finding a voice that heralded God’s handiwork in all things, and to do this in the medium of poetry. In doing so, I taught myself how to pray in a new, different manner, attempting to express my own daily devotions in poetic form, and hoping to speak to whomever would listen.

Once I aspired in this direction, the content of what I wanted to express flowed freely and I found my inspiration in Scripture, in worship, dreams, on my own front porch, and in the wonderful natural world in which we all have the privilege to live. My life’s love and I have had the pleasure to live where we could see God’s grandeur every day. She seconded my notion and encouraged me onward.

I have written this collection with no specific Christian denomination or theology in mind and in fact, have tried to present it as accessible to all Christians and people of faith. It is my hope that in reading the prayer/poems the reader will take as much delight in reading as I did in writing them.

1

January

1. A Year of Prayers

Father,

I offer you a year of prayer

a journey born of gratitude

in celebration of joy,

a daily map towards heaven.

Lord, help me with my bread,

employ the source, the yeast,

help me to aptly leaven

the daily stead, the stuff of days,

help me toward rightful ways,

regardless of critique from others,

save me from the woeful tides

of current conglomerates of conscience,

save me from the folly of persistent sways

that pull me to wrongful passages.

Lord, save me from false myths

and maladies, and of course

keep me true and fresh, untainted

by the strains of unrighteous force,

keep me focused on that which indicates,

confirms, that our lives are more than

brief appearances before we meet

a cold and meaningless dirt.

2. Lamb’s Life, Whale’s Eye

Lord,

This is the second day on a long march.

I want you to lead me into the New Jerusalem

so that I may live the right way,

that I may find something,

make something to celebrate, every day.

Lead me past struggles dogs and men make

in their circles to make their beds.

Let those who fight cease conflict with each other,

and let me make my way to beauty instead,

to your bounty, so that I may render it.

Show me the lamb’s life and the whale’s eye,

the salamander’s slime, the weave of the unobserved.

Keep my body up to the task

of offering evidence of your treasure.

Keep my heart soft and full of charity,

Satan safely behind his mask, his deeds a rarity,

and keep my children from harm’s way.

Amen.

3. Your Rubric Done

Lord,

Thank you for bringing me across

the living river

to be like the locked and loaded

spring that bounces back from dormancy to efficacy

at the proper arc of the sun,

not fooled by temperatures

where it may be jilted by frosts, lose its fruit,

but from a rule, your rubric done.

Thank you for welcoming me back

into the going, gangly, greening,

preening buds to blooms,

ants to elephants, seeds to Sequoias,

eggs to feathers, flights,

from a precipice where the body toils,

where some cells secede and mutiny,

to a fertile valley of your grace

that illuminates the weary nights.

4. O What a Joy

O what a joy

the mockingbird brings,

he has no reason,

no script or instructions

for what he does when he sings.

O what a joy

the music that is

the ear’s muse,

our own internal drum,

the blood’s fuse.

O what a joy

April brings,

when frost is lost

and in soggy soils

the mushroom springs.

O what a joy

my love in morning’s light,

combing her hair, coffee handed,

looking out over the lake with sun through the pines,

clear, certain, bright.

5. What the Katydid Did

O Lord,

I can talk, I can sing,

I can think and walk and love,

with gifts given by you since I was a kid.

I can pray and I can dance,

I can hope, cry and remember,

but I can’t do

what the katydid just did.

You gave him wings light as air,

you gave him a pair,

to float and fly across this yard,

and long grasshopper legs so he can jump

like he jumped when I tried to catch him

when I was just a kid,

the way he just jumped, that katydid did.

6. Father, Thank You

Father, from foibles wide and sure,

when I am in retreat,

dodging dangers ever there,

thank you for my feet.

Father, with full fall blue,

when I look up at skies,

nights with your glittering lights,

thank you for my eyes.

Father, for the beat that begins

in embryonic soup from the start

and ends on our last day,

thank you for my heart.

Father, some spans are struggles,

you make demands,

ours is to work for charity, faith, hope,

thank you for my hands.

Father, for our minute-made eternal,

ceasing silence for endless years,

you gave us our own made music,

thank you for my ears.

Father, for the Bard’s wonderful words,

voices whispered, spoken, written, sung,

in words, music, verse, my speech,

thank you for my tongue.

7. As Many

As many as the leaves on trees,

as many as the stars,

cars on freeways,

as ants crawling,

snowflakes falling,

as many as embers of forest fires,

we send our prayers to you,

O Lord,

usually not for ourselves

but for others, not for our desires

but for your holy healings, and so,

I send this one to you, O Lord,

so you will know

he needs your help very much.

He’s only five and his breath is labored,

free him Lord,

and release him of his sickness,

the way you do so many times

with your simple touch.

I pray to you,

I pray for her, for him, for me,

for in our earthly durations we

are like new nest birds

with our mouths wide open,

waiting for mother mana

to enter our needy throats,

we, who suffer and weep,

unable to fly, who reap

your bounties and give praise

but sooner or later need

your hand, as he does now.

8. Ephphatha

Lord Jesus,

To heavens obscured by pasty grays,

eyes vacant of currents, hues,

ears vibration-spared, held captive to still tyrannies of silence,

hearts with holes without counterparts,

feet lost on paths through desert wastes without water,

you would say, be thou open.

To those confined to chairs, beds,

dry wicks without oil, no light shed on wicked ways,

tongues unable to finesse a voice locked in moist mouths

the way pearls are oyster-locked in deep sea shells,

cold lips, empty hands secreted in pockets,

windows closed that could allow light

to seduce the cornea with yellow lust,

to doors that shut out ways and means,

winter woods weaned of springs,

you would say be thou open.

Tractions lose to plasma mud,

gelatin blood in vascular streams,

durable days