At the Window

I pray to the Invisible:

Please protect us
from blizzard and hail, from blaze and swelter,
from flying insects that sting and swarm,
from pestilence and sulfurous miasma,
and from the crowded bluster and welter.

But let us see the light,
through your architectured frame,
of sun, of stars, of moon, of clouds,
of dappled leaves, of shimmering creek,
and all your gentle creatures without names.

And give us wisdom –
when through your fearsome grace,
you slay a bird mid-flight
and leave an ashen smudge
suspended mid-air in its place.

AND when non-believers
doubt your clear perfection,
then at dusk reveal the veil
of dust and spots and filth
co-mingled in their own reflection,

So then, in them,
it will grow known
that they reside within
the mercy of your windowed house
and they should not throw stones.

SAGE Magazine , 17 February 2025

Notes: Windows are miraculous. They are nearly invisible. We rely on them. Yet they depend on our treating them reverently. Do you believe in windows, even when you cannot see them? Perhaps other things too? Form: In every stanza of five lines, the second and fifth lines rhyme, with double rhymes (e.g., “architectured frame” with “creatures without names”, and “fearsome grace” with “air in its place”). Content: In the third stanza, the image of the bird slain by crashing into a window uses the words “ashen smudge”, which are an allusion to Vladimir Nabokov’s poem, Pale Fire, which begins: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / by the false azure in the windowpane; / I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I / lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.”

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