My Broken Prayer – a poem by Michele Bombardier

My Broken Prayer

When she tells me her news, I say
I’ll hold you in my thoughts and I do:
I ask everyone to keep her longer on earth:
Creator, Goddess Mother, God the Father,
our ancestors, the broken statue of Mary
under the cedar tree in the backyard.
Buddha, fat and smiling by the front door.
The various goddesses that line our walk, 
brought home from garage sales 
or prizes from white elephants.
Every deity welcome.

The year that drove me to my knees: cancer
in my house in my bed in the air I kissed
when tucking my children in at night.
His constellation suggests no obvious path, 
the oncologist said of my husband’s lab results. 
Metastatic galactic. Cells exploring the frontier
of his body, looking for a place to land.
We’d peer at the graphs and numbers, 
nod and shake our heads in concert
with the earnest doctors in their white coats.
Maybe the stars would know, I thought.
I beseeched the heavens. 

One sleepless night I drove to a field
and when I felt good and alone
screamed myself to depletion. Then 
there it was, a wellspring of presence, 
a hammocking, I tell you. I felt something,
maybe the hand of God on my head,
maybe the porous veil laced thin.
I’ve not felt it since, but this memory 
is the rope anchor I attach myself to.
I want to believe the hammock will hold,
there is no freefall; me, my friend, all of us,
cupped like the rain in my broken Mary.

Michele Bombardier is the author of What We Do, a Washington Book Award finalist. Her work has appeared in JAMA, Atlanta Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Crab Creek Review and many others. She is a Hedgebrook fellow, the founder of Fishplate Poetry, and the inaugural poet laureate of her town.