A Late Prayer

After Τάσος Λειβαδίτης

Kyrie, may I yet draw near? Bearing my plain
poverty, my pettiness, longstanding chagrin
I wonder if I might nonetheless comfort you

some slight bit when, waking in the night, I believe
I hear your weeping, surely pierced again by our
adamant insistence on such small purposes.

++++++++++++++†

Kyrie, yes, in silence we apprehend most
vividly your nearness, supposing only then
how our words are so likely to cause your further

suffering. Even in our poor petitions we
tear your flesh, rend your spirit, multiply your pains–
as we glimpse within this carnage what is endless.

++++++++++++++†

Kyrie, we take and eat, and marvel at this
mysterious, interior coupling–outselves
and your immensity, performing our return

to endless life, a life occasioned by your death,
which ended death forever and for all. Amen.

++++++++++++++†

Kyrie, how am I to find you, right hidden
as you are behind our yammering, our shadows
made obscure by eyes that do not see, ears that will

not hear? A blessing: that regardless of this dense
obscurity odd moments come when in a flush
of thrumming excess in the heart you bid me know.

++++++++++++++†

Kyrie, without you I am yet the empty
hut awaiting your arrival, a sad moot point.
Kyrie, without me you bide still, a deep note
unexpressed, expanding, a yet imagined chord.

++++++++++++++†

Kyrie, though I cannot see your face, I have
yet supposed your nearness as we share this modest
dwelling place, this odd body pacing these same halls.

Even so, of a morning–off and on–I hear
your heavy footfalls in my given words, I feel
your insistent nudge as you bid me to exceed.

++++++++++++++†

Kyrie, as you are never anything less
than the spinning I Am awakening my own
being, and ever the endless now extending

as a beckoning path, so too, do you suggest
within the stillness at the heart the very words
that we might speak to quell disintegrating fear.

++++++++++++++†

Kyrie, I lie in a dark room, and without
speech, deaf to the music in which you move, blinking
in darkness thickening with the dimness of my

own dim wits. Enlighten me, give me breath and words,
and, if you would, some sustaining glimpse of the dome
under which you ever keep unassailable silence.

++++++++++++++†

Kyrie, since youth, I have watched for your approach.
At every vista, along every path I have
kept alert to sustain your possibility.

And all this time–surely even outside this time–
you have remained interred within my thought, have yet
lain mid your countless messengers stirring my heart.

++++++++++++++†

Kyrie, yes, I have many sins, have owned my
many sins. My greatest sin now appears to be
my bent desire to pierce the inexplicable

perplexity of your person, of your persons,
of your concurrent nearness and your diffidence.
Thus far, of this greatest sin I cannot repent.

++++++++++++++†

Kyrie, from time outside of time you have moved,
have made, have remained apparently outside all
things that you have made, have brought into being, save

ourselves–this reckless invention which you have deigned
to tolerate, endure, to bear, and to become.

++++++++++++++†

Kyrie, our beginning and our source, our long-
suffering agent biding time, forgive my now
voicing what keeps me circling in perplexity

from my first days choosing this fraught path–your silence
which remains a stone beneath the troubled surface
of this pool that is my mind, my nous, deficient.

From Correspondence with My Greeks, by Scott Cairns, published by Slant Books. Copyright © 2024. Used with permission.