Poetry – Issue 13 | September 2011
Prayer Boats
by Richard Schiffman
Ganges quits the range of endless snow here
at Hardwar, where foothills splay their toes
upon the plain, the river’s glacial milk
seethes. Prayer is a fleet of leaf boats
launched at dusk, to gongs, to bells and crackling
chants. Within those vegetable shells, beds of petal,
licks of flame—fireflies on the pitching stream.
Surely those fires will flicker out, surely
snuffed in river roil and run, in night
which rolls out and out its charcoal drapery.
Still we cast them on the waters, because fire
cannot remain for long with the one who lights it,
as a river cannot linger in the range of endless snow.
The heart, too, must launch itself at dusk, not because
it trusts its leaf, its flicker, or the somersaulting
flood. And not because it knows where it is headed.
Not because it dreams of a sea somewhere, a God
somewhere beyond the ocean of the night. The night
is all—the mother of us all. Still, there is something
that the night will never comprehend—the river
running through it to the morning’s
far shore.
About the author
A writer and former journalist for National Public Radio, Richard Schiffman is based in New York. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review, and many others. Read his Spiritual Poetry Portal.
Read our current issue, Issue 13 | September 2011:
Poetry
Berlin by Sy Margaret Baldwin
Two Poems by Sean Edgley
After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones by Jennifer Faylor
Painter by Ricky Garni
Other Than by Dana Guthrie Martin
Two poems by Timothy Kercher
Five Views of Guanajuato: A Mythology by Athena Kildegaard
Two poems by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Goya by Trent Nutting
The Changing of the Flowers by Jennifer Saunders
Two poems by Ken Turner
Postcard prose
Buttons by Jennifer Faylor
The Enemy Tree by Kirby Wright
Escape on the Canal by Addie Zierman
