Prayer Grows a Body
Cornell, Deirdre
Deirdre Cornell Prayer Grows a Body Freed from the charge of my grandmother's soul (Pray for the family living and dead, pray for your self, pray for the world), I no longer pray the rosary at...
...Each bead of bone and blood will testify to that struggle when the child someday asks, wailing, "Why was I ever born...
...I have given over that task for a while...
...You were born to become a rosary, a thread that ties us from one world to the next...
...My body is stringing holiness cell by cell, precious bone by precious bone...
...But when it springs forth, unfurled in symmetry, multiplied in lengththen is the time to pray...
...Leaving nothing out, knotting tiny vertebrae in small, tight formation, like a rosary curled in the palm of your hand...
...It will climb hand over fist the rope of my spine, wrestling each mystery as it labors toward light...
...Deirdre Cornell Prayer Grows a Body Freed from the charge of my grandmother's soul (Pray for the family living and dead, pray for your self, pray for the world), I no longer pray the rosary at night but string my own...
...Its beginning found not in my body not in my mother's body but in the hushed breath of Irish and Italian women fingering strands of wood, crystal, glass, and plastic for perhaps seven hundred years...
Vol. 124 • April 1997 • No. 7
