You do not have to be good. All you have to do is tend
a blade, a leaf, turn grains of sand into spun glass:
raise your sacred memories in the blood of your children,
turn pebbles into letters, into words, into prayers
and string them around your daughters’ necks, richer
than rubies, harder than diamonds, whiter than pearls.
Let loose the long vowels that call you to your God;
fight the emptiness of each doubt pressed to your neck.
When you praise in words you can never own,
and when the sun is not the sun, and streams flow backward,
and your desk is dry and vacant, and there is a bush on fire
in your desert, and earth takes shape into syllables,
and your tongue is swollen with silence,
remember, this is not my poem to write: it is yours.
by Mercedes O’Leary
