A Painted Prayer

A painted prayer

A star, fallen,

But still twinkling…

Trembles on a stalk, her former grand fire shattered

Into a blooming death. 

Why did she pass from the kingdom of the skies to

The kingdom of the meadow?

Strange dark flower—

Are you an angel of royal blue and yellow

Now grounded in the soil of suffering?

My art–this habit of giving too much importance to small and unremarkable things–

Proclaims (to you this day) the year of wrung-out Jubilee.

You who stand outside this canvas, 

Touch my quiet garden of glory, cultivated with thick, frantic rows of pain and paint.

Come inside to pluck the obliging star; use her petals to sooth like salve

Your self-mutilated ear. 

Lost stars that lend their shapes

To the grass of the field,

And the wicked ones that blinked their lights on and then off

Might one day be judged by forgiving artists as mere lightening bugs. 

Would that the path that moves the damned away from Gehina 

Be lit up by their bright butts. 

Someone unknown at Ignite (a monthly Hickory Ridge worship service) painted a bold black star on a canvas and then threw it away. I picked it up out of the trash and tried to turn the  star into a flower and copied a little of Van Gogh’s ‘Les Iris’ around the star/flower. At some point I wrote a few words on the back of the canvas, and then months later I painted some more, and thought of resident whose walls seemed to be asking for it. After I gave it to her on Thursday I finished the poem. It makes me happy, so I give it to you too.