The Asketerion

                    Night Prayer by Sally Read

 

Don’t think the night’s all deadness—there are wells

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of light and dark, and many kinds of silence. Tonight

 

the snow breathes light and three large hares, white

 

on white, are munching left-out carrots, lolloping trails

 

of nothing in a silky, new-ink silence. It’s the silence

 

of how your hair would sound when it rises on your scalp.

 

It wakes the hermit; that and the beating heart of Christ

 

that pushes through the night like a boat through

 

brackish waters. There is no chapel-bell, no tramping march

 

of monks. Just one mind in the wooden room, apiece

 

with the fresh-ink hush. Thoughts are indivisible

 

from prayer; speech inseparable from silence and his heart

 

which echoes endlessly with what God spoke. He rises.

 

The snow-light seethes around him, like insomnia or love.