My ankles brush
the sage and scrub, and I can no longer
recall my mother’s hands, and soon my
name too, is lost among the humming-
birds, among the blur of their beating
wings, among their ruby and purple
throats flickering in the bronze fog.
–Michael Luis Dauro, “Sierra Amnesia”
A prayer is the unsung who’ve already offered their hands, having hoisted up the beloveds into the branches to keep them alive.
How many prayers go unsung.
Sometimes prayers are not enough.
Often prayers are not enough.
Sometimes prayers turn against us, against them, against—
Far beneath the ruins, the ruins of prayers.
Under two-story homes quickly built and whitewashed with red slanting roofs and yards, there are prayers weeping, leveled and burned. No one hears them.
Sometimes I look for them.
I am not an expert on prayers.
I have not prayed inside a synagogue for nearly a decade.
I belong to no house of prayer.
Sometimes I light veladoras to saints and pray in my home.
I am a most flawed Jew.
I no longer know which way to face Jerusalem when I pray.
I no longer look for Jerusalem when I pray.
I married a man who was raised a Buddhist, and now says he does, almost mostly, not believe in God.
I’ve asked him to pray with me, and he does always.
He prays, and even if he doesn’t believe, perhaps we are a conduit.
Sometimes I want to believe I am a conduit and my prayer is a conduit for the prayers of those I love.
That only then the act of praying is enough.
I walk past synagogues all over the city, and feel the cold breath of Rosh Hashanah morning.
Sometimes a prayer is every Rosh Hashanah morning heralding in a new beginning.
Sometimes it isn’t.
I have prayed under the sycamore trees in Skillman Avenue.
I have not prayed with fellow Jews in years.
I have prayed before both statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary outside the Church of Saint Teresa in Queens for an uncle whom my prayers could not save, and this I knew, but did not believe.
Because I did not believe, my prayers rang true.
I believe they rang true.
This is not a prayer.
I am a most flawed human being.
Sometimes I believe I was meant to encounter no one at all.
Often it is in those times I do.
A prayer is the names of those we love.
Always, the weight of the names of those we love gives us pause and gives us mercy.
Say their names always.
A prayer is the unsung having turned to the range of sight, range of fire.
A prayer is saying their names over and over and over.
A prayer, quite frankly, is the new legislation for those unsung who need to not fear the ground.
Say their names.
Say their names.
Within ruins, the prayers will hear and they will sing.
I don’t know if they will sing.
A prayer is for the most unsung of us.
A prayer is the most unsung.
Say their names.