Pray?

I am always drawn to wayside pulpits: those signs nailed on trees (especially in the North), imploring or, more often, raising the pitch or actually commanding: Jesus Is The Way And The Light, Repent, etc. Such messages/proclamations can be found on large billboards or the archetype with the sandwich -board. I remember coming across one handwritten one, perhaps from a single devotee, advertising the 'power' of prayer on the walls of numerous public toilets in cafés and bars in Dublin.

What such entreaties miss by a healthy mile is that prayer, or what passes for prayer these days, is usually very different things to different people. Not that someone should not 'say' a well-known prayer. But surely we need to discover, or rediscover, such prayers for ourselves. Will passing motorists feel compelled to take up the rosary simply because a sign on a tree prompts them to? Will as many be turned on as put off? I dunno. Maybe such promptings work for some.

I spotted this one, above, from the car on our way back to Dublin. I wonder at the kind of person who put it there. Perhaps it's the politeness of it, but I immediately thought of an elderly woman. Unlikely, as it takes an amount of dogged energy to do such a thing. It could just as easily have been a brash young thing, brimming with confidence. I suspect that the person who wrote it felt that a prayer had been answered, and was anxious to pass on this information without stating it too baldly.

I am bemused that anyone should actually believe that prayer 'works' in this fashion; like a health-food recipe that can be handed on or a piece of technical advice, as if God had a nose for home-cooked, time-honoured words, or His ear were a satellite dish that could only pick up certain signals or channels, while others (the devout mother praying for her doomed child, the child praying for his doomed parents, the famine-struck wilting in millions...) are presumably not strong enough. Or maybe a 'proper' prayer, like a church spire (or even a crucifix) can boost the signal, in the way of mobile phone masts. This may sound like cynicism, but it's closer to curiosity. I am superstitious (magpies, numbers, etc.) or maybe just mildly OCD, but the day I actually seriously recommend my own esoteric little rituals to anyone else will be the day my sanity has packed its bags and left.

Superstitions aside, I have my own kinds of prayer. These are about as far from rote prayers, such as the rosary, as one can get: often brief as a glance, at a patch of light on a wall, a cloud/moon/gulp of starlight, a window with its blind down, like a bright sail in the night, the words I speak to my dead friend Anthony and, now, my mother. Each is a form of acknowledgment, a framing of a moment (in gratitude, awe, dread). When this urge gets into my poetry, as it inevitably does, it is often to (as Milosz put it) 'glorify things just because they are.' And when it gets into my photography, it is usually an attempt to hold and/or prise open a moment that 'utters itself' (as Carol Ann Duffy puts it in her poem, 'Prayer') by separating this from the infinite sliced pan of moments that bookend it. For example, someone else's plea for prayer, nailed to the older rooted prayer of the roadside tree, the prayer of passing traffic branching into the prayer of the field, the prayer of fugitive blue.