Prayer in a Language I'm Forgetting

Noor Haddad

Prose poem · Faith

I still know the shape of the prayer, the way the body folds and rises, the cool of the floor against my forehead. It is the words that are going. They loosen a little each year, like a hem. I say them now the way you hum a song whose verses you have lost — carried by the melody, trusting my mouth to remember what my mind no longer holds. God, if you are listening, I hope you grade on intention. I hope the bowing counts. I hope the ache in the right place is its own kind of fluent.

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Up nextA Letter to Whoever Is Running ThisTo whoever is running this: I am not writing to complain. I want that on the record first, because everyone writes to you to complain, and you must be so tired of the mail. I am writing to say that the pomegranate is ridiculous. That you did not have to make the inside look like that. That a thing we eat could have been plain, could have been a potato, and instead it is a chandelier of small red rooms, and no one asked you to, and you did it anyway. I am writing to say I noticed. I am writing to say that if this is all there is — the pomegranate, the light on the taxis, the particular person asleep in the other room breathing like the tide coming in — then it was, on balance, worth the trouble of existing, and I withdraw, provisionally, every complaint I have not yet sent.