Prayer Signs

Kevin Garrison 

August 28, 2022

The church is never silent. 

Look. Over in that corner,  

A spider spins its webs in octaves  

Undetected, spinning an antenna  

To amplify the electric crackle  

And flapping wings of the luciferin-filled  

Firefly hoping to escape the room. 

Listen. Even higher,  

The long-dead wood in the rafters  

Still speaks in creaks and pops,  

The roof molded by the doxological  

Calls of thousands of voices  

Who no longer sing and carpenters  

Who no longer build. 

Close your eyes and ears, now.  

Next to you, during this dark moment  

Of silence, a baby cries to mother for milk,  

The most beautiful of all prayers.  

The child behind you scratches  

An itch and rustles his Sunday best.  

You can feel the air move as the parents  

Place their hands on their children's bodies, 

Signing “Be still, child.” 

Forgive me these digressions.  

I keep replaying a scene from a funeral 

Last month: the microphone slowly  

Dropping from the grieving daughter's mouth,  

The weight of the microphone pulling  

Against an improperly tightened nut.  

No one could hear the eulogy,  

The mother living in the daughter's body and words.  

Only the Deaf could see the raw lips 

While the rest of the room pretended to hear. 

Do me the smallest of favors, reader.  

Be better than us. At the next funeral,  

I dream that one of you stands up,  

Pauses the tears, and says "I can't hear." 

We are all deaf. 

A body lays in linen, hands folded 

Over a chest in the sign for "love,"  

Smiling up at the casket roof forever. 

Kevin Garrison is a deaf professor of English at Angelo State University. He resides in the central spaces between Deaf World and Hearing World, and his poetry grapples with the daily challenges of being oral deaf, often with hints of religious symbolism.