My Spiritual Practice – a poem by Cecil Morris

My Spiritual Practice



It is practice, the going again and again
through the heavy double doors and along
the polished wooden pews, the week’s program 
in my hand, the list of hymns and verses ready
for the faithful and the struggling, the ones like me
who repeat the prayers silently but with my lips 
in motion.  It is practice, the discipline 
of repetition, the dumb fingers climbing the scale,
rehearsing the tricky cross over, making time 
to serve the melody, making the body serve 
the will, and training the spirit when the spirit 
no longer feels the flame of faith.  It is practice,
the familiar, the regular, the repeated 
that will keep the spirit afloat assures the priest,
agrees the therapist, the bright orange vest you wear
to sustain you through the rapids and buoy you 
in the deepest waters, the keel of the life boat 
where you cling even after belief has capsized. 
It is practice, not perfection, not mastery,
that winches me out of my despair following 
her loss, the winding rope of dailiness, the meals 
with awkward friends, the re-filling of bird feeders
each morning, the dogged breaking up of concrete 
and hauling of debris, the work down on my knees
to level flagstones, the Wednesday morning doughnut 
rendezvous, the Sundays inside the heavy doors,
under high ceilings, arches, and the rhythmic words 
that I heard again and again that hold me here.

Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, and now he tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (maybe) enjoy. He has had a handful of poems published in Cimarron Review, English Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Poem, and other literary magazines.