Prayer for Quiet Waters

—–for Kristi

Make her thoughts a pencil sketch
empty of all but line, untroubled

nation of clear bounds,
unquestioned loyalties and love, still,

calm as springs rising from the
hidden source. There is an

aquifer beneath our words. She knows: that
heart, that lamb, that longing to be held.

Last week, a friend’s son was able to draw a clear and basic map of South America. This is a boy on the autism spectrum whose secondary diagnosis is Developmental Motor Coordination Disorder. His mother posted the drawing with the note, “Hope is alive!” I’m mindful of that drawing in the first two stanzas here – the way it simplifies borders and removes the human web of complication. This poem is for the nonverbal daughter of another friend who loves Psalm 23. When she speculates on what Kristi’s thought life is like, she conceives of it as quiet. Thinking of these children who may know still and quiet waters more than most, I decided to continue my experimentation with acrostic poems and take Psalm 23 as a starting point. The Hebrew word for quiet is menuchah, the feminine form meaning resting place or peaceful repose. It serves as my acrostic guide. I see the poem working as a prayer for each of us who needs a little rest and quiet of mind. I’m taken with the aquifer metaphor as a way of thinking about what happens in thought beneath speech. If God, as shepherd, leads beside those still waters that emerge from underground springs, perhaps we needn’t struggle so hard to articulate or justify. Perhaps that’s part of what rest is – a settling into places language doesn’t reach. In our exhaustion, may we tap into that reserve and rest.