Ozark Prayer of the Virginian Sunset
By Madison Tunnicliff
Frayed cloth on my grandmother’s dining room table
Gathers into pear colored waves beneath my elbows
As my hands raise to form the steeple where I utter my first prayer,
Scabbed palms pressed to meet my nose,
Sunburnt from yesterdays’s afternoons--
“May I be worthy of my meat,” I whisper
Into clenched hands ready to bare fork and knife
To meet tooth and bone before my grandmother
Takes her guiding hand to mine;
Wrinkled years of worship in her skin press
To my scraped hands and
She tells me,
“That’s not how prayer works, dear
Her brow shrivels, growing in years as
A sigh leaves my cracked lips and
My grandfather sets his coffee mug down
Next to an empty plate.
He takes my hand in his and my grandmother’s
In his and my grandmother’s in mine
Before his head bows and the twitching he had all morning
Stops
And our heads follow in procession.
“Dear lord,” his begins, Ozark twang
Clashing with a quiver in his voice I was
Too young to yet understand,
“May my granddaughter and her
Grandmother be fruitful
And faithful in all that they do, may
You bless their days and nights to come and
Mine too, Lord, as we do
Everything in you.
And God, bless us and
Thank you for this last meal today, and
May we all be worth of our meat,
The meat that wraps our bones and grinds against our teeth, Lord,
The meat of our hearts and the meat,
Of Jesus Christ,
the Lamb.
God bless us, Lord, as we gather here tonight,
Thank you and
Amen.”