Prayerfully Oblique, delicate prayer. Wild, blind prayer – spare space this week’s rosary. Sapphira says there’s a decade knotted around the noose for my sin. Skip Monday’s joyful mystery, skip Tuesday’s sorrow – Mother knows
Prayerfully
Oblique, delicate prayer. Wild,
blind prayer - spare space
this week’s rosary. Sapphira
says there’s a decade knotted
around the noose for my sin.
Skip Monday’s joyful mystery,
skip Tuesday’s sorrow -
Mother knows we need your
fumble-fingering through beads.
Caress in private grace, like times
spent on the side of the hill, hooked,
shut and ascending. I’m still scaling,
sanctity scarce, set with scars, sights
on sainthood. Oblique, delicate prayer.
Wild, blind prayer - simple - spare space
this week’s rosary for my prey. I cannot
utter yet, but I’ll think about it, from the perch,
crouching over the side of almost sleep.
R. M. Francis
R. M. Francis is from Dudley. He’s a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Wolverhampton and author of five poetry pamphlet collections. His debut novel, Bella, is out in March 2020 with Wild Pressed Books, and Smokestack books will publish his first full collection of poems, Subsidence, in October 2020. In 2019 he was the inaugural David Bradshaw Writer in Residence at the University of Oxford; these four poems began during that residency.