Snakes and Ladders

For Czesław Milosz

You claim to say how to pray to Someone who isn’t.
Tell me why not to talk to someone who Is.
All you know are speeches that elevate us.
What I don’t know are the sounds that never suppress me.

Airing them, in your view, we’re aloft with compassion;
sparing them, in mine, we’re alone with passion.
Your way seems straight and mine so sinuous,
but the steepest path between souls need not be the best.

Make no mistake about the nonsense
shaping rhetorical scapegoats from sighs
of sin in a void below, forefingers raised
for admonition, contrition, final admission:
God must have too much to do to hear supplications.
Share, rather, the voice of your world’s vibrations.

--Jon van Leuven



Jon van Leuven notes: "This mostly unrhymed sonnet is a response to [the Nobel Prize-winning Polish-Lithuanian American poet Czesław] Miłosz 's 'On Prayer.' . . . I was influenced by having recently fallen off a ladder in my garden and by gratitude to the snakes that kept field mice out of it."


Nous sommes le
18 Ventôse, An 217