So that’s why prayers don’t work: God doesn’t speak English,

doesn’t speak anything. His books are translations

from something not language, since to begin a sentence

is to drive from glare into the dimness of a tunnel,

losing the view of the harbor, the skyline, the heavens

(the universe of all you’ve left unsaid),

and what can God know of ignorance,

who cannot feel a single, solitary thing

as we do: as, for a moment, all there is?

Not that he hasn’t tried. Once, they tell us,

he let a part of himself be lost

in the dark box of a body, nights like eons

buried alive, the air giving out, each hard breath forever,

so that finally he tore what they call his son

back through the little hole between life and death,

the Earth shuddering, his mother abruptly virgin,

but not before he had cried his one real sentence,

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

That terrible sentence we hold to, all of us,

in this little room, alone with our wondering

who in the darkness of ourselves we are talking to.