Praying.

Salgado, Praying to Mixe God, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1980

Here is the wind bending the reeds westward,

The patchwork of morning on gray moraine

Had I words I could tell of origin,

Of God’s hands bloody with birth at first light,

Of my thin squeals in the heat of his breath,

Of the taste of being, the bitterness,

And scents of camas root and chokecherries.

And, God, if my mute heart expresses me,

I am the rolling thunder and the bursts

Of torrents upon rock, the whispering

Of old leaves, the silence of deep canyons.

I am the rattle of mortality.

I could tell of the splintered sun. I could
Articulate the night sky, had I words.

N. Scott Momaday