[Rhina P. Espaillat]

This is a poem I've known and loved for a long time, for both literary and personal reasons: maybe that's the way poems work when they're completely successful. And I think Roger has hit on exactly the tone in the poem that moves me most: the irony, the ambivalence, about prayer that is nevertheless engaged in because everything else is also hopeless. It is humor, of course, but of the dark kind, and without anger or bitterness. Wonderful poem.