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Flashlights

Chapter 16: PRAYERS
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About This Book

A compact collection of lyric sketches, reflective poems, and stories in verse that illuminate fleeting moments of urban and domestic life. Through vignette-style pieces the author observes barbershops, cafés, and crowded public spaces, probing loneliness, social exchange, and quiet moral dilemmas. Other poems turn inward to meditate on longing, rest, and mortality, sometimes adopting epistolary or conversational forms. A concluding section offers narrative metres that compress human interactions into sharp dramatic scenes. Spare language, sensory detail, and shifts between irony and tenderness bind the sections into a mosaic of early twentieth-century moods and manners.

PRAYERS

Day by day I tread my appointed way
Greeting the sun with dutiful intent,
Seeing his slow decline into the West,
Watching draw near my night of quietude.
Each day I see fade slowly back to join
Those other days, unlived, unloved, unmourned,
That have passed by in grave processional
With never a golden one to mark their passing.
Sometimes at night I ask the friendly stars
“Tell me, what do I here? Why have I breath
And this fair body in a world of shadows?
Why do I live?”
But the stars shine silently
And make no answer.
Sometimes I ask of God,
“Dear Lord, I love Thee well
But Thou art far away—
Couldst Thou not send to me
Someone on earth to love?
So should I love Thee more.”
But God sends no one.
Sometimes I ask the far tumultuous sea,
“Oh Sea, give me of your great beating heart!
Let me be swept on the whirlwind,
Let me be lulled and rocked,
Let me be storm-tossed, made mad,
Then—let me perish!”
But the Sea roars on unheeding.
So day by day I tread my appointed way
Greeting the sun with dutiful intent,
Seeing his slow decline into the West,
Watching draw near my night of quietude.