HELP US PRAY

Black block letters proclaim this message
on a church marquee. Yes. I search
for prayers in every corner
of this sphere. In the stairwell,
my mother finds a praying mantis:
a found poem, a found prayer.
I think of grasshoppers and crickets,
wings and strings. Of my music teacher
and the indentation in her thumb
from decades of cello devotion. I pray
for my brain to preserve “Le cygne”
eternally. I dream of performing
that swan song, even though my cello lives
in a state I haven’t been to in a year.
When I wake, my fingers are flying
across imaginary strings. Crickets strum
their invocations in the backyard
back home, where snapdragons still rise
from prayer-tilled soil. As a child,
I puppeteered their petal jaws.
They spoke to the sky.

Anabella Schofield is a poet and children’s book author from California. She loves to craft wonder-filled works, especially in collaboration with her twin sister.