Bones of a Prayer

Bones of a Prayer

I don’t always have the words—

Some nights, the mouth is a locked chapel

and every syllable a knuckle gone stiff.

~~

So I pray by structure:

spine straight as a candle,

shoulder blades like small open doors,

hands held together, not for show

But so they don’t drop the light.

~~

I learned that hope has cartilage—

It flexes, or it doesn’t.

On hard days, it creaks like stairs

I climb anyway.

~~

There’s a liturgy of ordinary things:

keys placed softly on the dish,

the kettle’s brief psalm,

the window rehearsing dawn

behind its breath-fog.

~~

If faith is a skeleton,

It remembers falls:

the rib that guarded thunder,

the wrist that caught goodbye,

The knee that found the floor before the voice did.

~~

I count the bones I can name

and forgive the ones I can’t—

they’ve held me without ceremony,

kept the high places inside me

from caving in.

~~

Your name, when I speak it,

isn’t an altar—

more like a bridge beam,

something steady enough to cross

without bowing.

~~

Tonight I do not ask.

I listen to what’s left standing—

the quiet geometry of breath,

the durable hinge of the heart,

Each beat is a door I pass through.

~~

If a prayer needs flesh,

let it be action;

if it needs light,

let it be the small lamp

I leave it on for myself.

~~

By morning, my posture remembers:

Sorrow can sit without sinking,

hands can open without spilling,

and a body, even tired,

still spells amen in bone.