A poem: Prayer

When I am stressed (and oh yes, I am this week) poetry can help. This atmospheric, wistful poem, by Carol Ann Duffy, which I rediscovered recently on Jeanette Winterson's poetry website, is a favourite.

The last line refers to the sea areas listed in the Shipping Forecast – broadcast daily first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Their names are evocative and I hear them usually when I am in bed with the radio on - either at the beginning or the end of a day. And the forecast is indeed rather like a prayer, or a litany, comforting in its familiarity and yet with an edge of fear – it conjures up visions of cold, perhaps dangerous, seas .....

PRAYER

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.