“Apologia for Prayer” Lucia Galloway

Apologia for Prayer
“If I should die before I wake . . .”

And it’s not as though staying awake
will save you. Think of those things
outside even Jove’s control:
the blast, the bullet,
the careening car,
funneling wind, voracious fire.
Think of Vesuvius spewing,
Pompeii’s people silent, silted.

Like boarding a train,
prayer is homage to the leaping hour.
It follows then that prayers unsaid
are a dance refused,
a gift unsent or put away unused,
the soul’s torpor on a hot afternoon
and no rain falling.

Lucia Galloway

Lucia Galloway lives in southern California and co-hosts “Fourth Sundays: Poetry at the Claremont Library.” Her chapbook The Garlic Peelers was co-winner of the Quill’s Edge Press 2014 poetry competition. Other books are Venus and Other Losses (2010) and a chapbook, Playing Outside (2005). One of ten winners of Rhyme Zone’s 2014-15 Poetry Prize, as well as a Pushcart and Best-of-the-Net nominee, Galloway has recently published poems in literary magazines such as Tar River, The Sow’s Ear, Centrifugal Eye, New Verse News, and San Pedro River Review. She is represented in the anthologies, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Pacific Coast Poetry Series) and Thirty Days: The Best of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project’s First Year. She sings in the 80-voice Mountainside Master Chorale and enjoys the varied natural and cultural resources of the region she calls home.

Photo Credit: Staff