! ! Praying Hands Poem by Michael Shepherd

When the whole church kneels to pray
- though some of us just pretend to kneel:
leaning forward uncomfortably,
our ungainly bums only observed
by the row in the pew behind –

the lady next to me does it in style,
yet with observable humility:
she was taught to kneel, I guess, in
Sunday School when she was five or less,
and about seventy years later,
here’s devotion's lifetime posture still:

erect, elbows on the pew’s bookshelf,
so that her hands together point straight,
let’s say, to heaven; counterpointed
by the head a little lowered in humility;

and I study, discreetly, these praying hands,
subtly shaded by a lifetime
in rose, white, grey, yellow, brown, red, blue;
here smooth, here barely covering bone,
here worn, here wrinkled;

the rest of her, devout; an innerness
which I can only guess at
in her lifetime stance; but these hands
with their lifetime of a woman’s work
have, this Sunday morning, offered up
their mighty selves unto their maker God..

When my mother’s dressed for Sunday
she’s a stranger to the child in me:
dressed in matching hat, gloves, handbag, shoes;
not for the public eye or anyone’s approval,
but as the public dresses for its God;

and I glance at these hands, which speak to me
of prayer, of life, that's way beyond my childish mind;
these stranger hands, with more things yet untold
than I would know or dare to ask of her.