Cane

Chapter 36: PRAYER

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About This Book

The work assembles lyric sketches, poems, and short stories that move between the rural Black South and the urban North, rendering scenes of field labor, small-town intimacies, migration, and city struggle. Its language blends musical, imagistic poetry with prose vignettes, shifting tone from sensual celebration and folklore to psychological tension and spiritual searching. Structurally divided into three parts, it juxtaposes primitive southern evocations, a middle section of urban self-consciousness, and a return offering more meditative, symbolic pieces. Recurring themes include racial identity, desire, community, and the search for meaning through artistic and spiritual expression.

PRAYER

My body is opaque to the soul.

Driven of the spirit, long have I sought to temper it unto the spirit’s longing,

But my mind, too, is opaque to the soul.

A closed lid is my soul’s flesh-eye.

O Spirits of whom my soul is but a little finger,

Direct it to the lid of its flesh-eye.

I am weak with much giving.

I am weak with the desire to give more.

(How strong a thing is the little finger!)

So weak that I have confused the body with the soul,

And the body with its little finger.

(How frail is the little finger.)

My voice could not carry to you did you dwell in stars,

O Spirits of whom my soul is but a little finger...