Prayer Poetry Quotes & Sayings

Hello my Country I once came to tell everyone your story Your passion was my poetry And your past my most potent glory Your promise was my prayer Your hypocrisy my nightmare And your problems fill my present Are we both going somewhere? — Harry Chapin

Prayer is that which conveys a message to God, who is either known or knowing, more or less by definition. Poetry is that which conveys a message to a stranger. — G.C. Waldrep III

Why should I pray? Why should I venerate and be ceremonious? — Walt Whitman

Fore Word
Poetry and prayer are synonymous in my life, and because both are a gift, which I accept with joy and sometimes pain, I seldom know whether I have served the gift well or ill. But perhaps that doesn't really matter; the important thing is to be willing - to want to serve the gift whenever it comes, either as verse or prayer ...
My heart's climate is not constant; I doubt if anyone's is. My inner weather shifts with the days. But much sunshine has shone on me through the sharing and giving and receiving.
And so I am taught to pray. And so I am taught to be. — Madeleine L'Engle

Good poetry is like effective prayer, it feeds the human spirit, it nourishes, it puts us in touch with forces far greater than ourselves — Lorna Goodison

Poetry is not difficult. If you possess one of the five senses, poetry is in it. If you can compose text message, tweet or Facebook status, you can write poetry. If you can rap a song, you can rhyme poetry. If you can memorise a prayer, you can recite poetry. If you struggle to make sense of formatted text, poetry is your call. — Gloria D. Gonsalves

Rooftop Poetry
Sing poetry from rooftops
like a muzzein' s call for prayer. — Beryl Dov

All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer. — Samuel Beckett

Quiet Prayer:
As long as the sun shall rise goes the old lovers vow. But we are children of a scientific age & have no time for poetry. Still, I offer a quiet prayer of thanks for the sunlight each time I see your face. — Brian Andreas

Immersed in surrender and gratitude, celestial pearls of wisdom form rosaries of prayer that entangle with my soul. — Earthschool Harmony

The nature of poems
Is a matter of words and deeds
An intimate encounter of voice
In the ache of the heart
In the labor of breathing
A hesitant casting of eyes
Away from the mundane to see
That delicate and shiny thing
In the oddly prosaic rock pile
An extravagance of conceit
An abundance of grace
A prayer for words to speak — Kendall Dana Lockerman

Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere. — James Martineau

Our parents prayer is the most beautiful poetry and expectations — CG9sYXJhZGl0aWE=

Tom Dancer's gift of a whitebark pine cone

You never know
What opportunity
Is going to travel to you,
Or through you.

Once a friend gave me
A small pine cone-
One of a few
He found in the scat

Of a grizzly
In Utah maybe,
Or Wyoming.
I took it home

And did what I supposed
He was sure I would do-
I ate it,
Thinking

How it had traveled
Through that rough
And holy body.
It was crisp and sweet.

It was almost a prayer
Without words.
My gratitude, Tom Dancer,
For this gift of the world
I adore so much
And want to belong to.
And thank you too, great bear — Mary Oliver

If I could find one word
that would shudder the air
like that frightened sob,
that wordless prayer
of my newly-born,
who drew one breath,
and with unopened eyes
sank back into death;
If I could break the world's cold heart
with that cry,
then this grief would lift
and I could die. — Kenneth L. Patton

In this space,

We do raw
We do loud hearts
& truthful art

We do open arms
& unfettered forgiveness

We do real
We do vulnerable
We do wild

In this space,
We do love

In all the shapes
& forms
That we come in

We do love — Bryonie Wise

Scatter as a prayer
escaping my lips...

as orchids
blooming in clouds. — Sanober Khan

I am filled time and again
with a heart-aching wonder
when I think

of the fire
and frost of memories

of the everlastingness
of love

the solace
of family
and the power
of prayer. — Sanober Khan

Solace of Silence
surreal synapses
of a melancholy drone
a dream per chance
she dared not be alone ... — Muse

The Lord's Prayer is the most perfect piece of poetry. I always feel at peace and moved when I recite it. — Mary Quant

I beg you, help me, in angelic charity,
Pray my efforts will reflect your mastery! — E.A. Bucchianeri

Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world. — Colson Whitehead

Offerings gleam beneath consecrated trees,
boulders, and caves where Kami nature spirits
minister to congregations of saki cans, lotus root,
and the glow of tangerines; still-lives silent as prayer. — Jalina Mhyana

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand
a center of gravity. — Adrienne Rich

A lot of the shadow self is the home of poetry, story, prayer. My deepest understandings are often released from the part of me of which I am least aware most of the time. — Madeleine L'Engle

You only have to do one good thing to be in somebody's lifetime of prayers. — Sanober Khan

The day I bought my cane, I realized
I was through with the burden of feet. Instead,
I am going to become a mermaid.
I have always liked the ocean, the promise
of depth. I am tired of this dry world,
all of this dust and sickness, these barren fields.
I want to dive without drowning. I want to kiss sharks.
I want men to carve me into the bows of their ships
like a prayer, before I lure them into the depths
with my fishnet mouth. I want the beauty,
the gorgeous mutation, the fairytale of half body.
All the wisdom of a woman, without the failures of sex.
I am plunging. I am not coming up for air.
I do not want all this human,
my legs move like they resent being legs,
my body is wrecked by all this gravity.
I cannot face another morning waking up
with no hope of a fairytale. Here on land,
I am always drowning. Here on land,
I cannot move. — Clementine Von Radics

Poetry and prayer are very similar. — Carol Ann Duffy

I don't know if you're alive or dead.
Can you on earth be sought,
or only when the sunsets fade
be mourned secretly in my thought?

All is for you: the daily prayer,
the sleepless heat at night,
and of my verses, the white
flock, and of my eyes, the blue fire.

No-one was more cherished, no-one tortured
me more, not
even the one who betrayed me to torture,
not even the one who caressed me and forgot. — Anna Akhmatova

Author's Prayer
If I speak for the dead, I must
leave this animal of my body,
I must write the same poem over and over
for the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.
If I speak of them, I must walk
on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man
who runs through the rooms without
touching the furniture.
Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What year
is it?"
I can dance in my sleep and laugh
in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,
I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak
of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say
is a kind of petition and the darkest days
must I praise. — Ilya Kaminsky

Prayer is a many fingered
and kaleidoscopic thing - it folds
and unfolds inside of you. It enters
the many rooms you cannot enter. — Cecilia Llompart

O we are wearied of this sense of guilt,
Wearied of pleasure's paramour despair,
Wearied of every temple we have built,
Wearied of every unanswered right, unanswered prayer,
For man is weak; God sleeps: and heaven is high:
One fiery-colored moment: one great love: and lo! we die. — Oscar Wilde

Meditation is the most significant because it opens the door for all other significant things: love, prayer, God, light, music, poetry. — Rajneesh

Love leads us to write poetry because love improves our hearing; like prayer, poetry is every bit as much about listening as it is about speaking. To 'get' the poem is to hear the eloquence of the silence that it calls forth through its manifestation of love. — David Patterson

The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry. — Alice McDermott

Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

She entered a state where prayer and poetry became one and the everyday world seemed full of holiness and significance. — Lian Hearn

Billy didn't need someone to pour him his drinks, he needed someone to tell him that living isn't poetry. It isn't prayer. To tell him and convince him. And none of us could do it because every one of us thought that as long as Billy believed it was, as long as he kept himself believing it, then maybe it could still be true. — Alice McDermott

I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation. — Derek Walcott

My prayers, my tears, my wishes, fears, and lamentations, were witnessed by myself and heaven alone. When we are harassed by sorrows or anxieties, or long oppressed by any powerful feelings which we must keep to ourselves, for which we can obtain and seek no sympathy from any living creature, and which yet we cannot, or will not wholly crush, we often naturally seek relief in poetry - and often find it, too - whether in the effusions of others, which seem to harmonize with our existing case, or in our own attempts to give utterance to those thoughts and feelings in strains less musical, perchance, but more appropriate, and therefore more penetrating and sympathetic, and, for the time, more soothing, or more powerful to rouse and to unburden the oppressed and swollen heart. — Anne Bronte

I believe in the flesh and the appetites;
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from;
The scent of these arm-pits, aroma finer than prayer;
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds. — Walt Whitman

The gestures poems make are the same as the gestures of ritual injunction - curse; exorcism; prayer; underlying everything perhaps, the attempt to make someone or something live again. Both poet and shaman make a model that stands for the whole. Substitution, symbolic substitution. The mind conceives that something lived, or might live. Implicit is the demand to understand. The memorial that is ward and warning. Without these ancient springs poems are merely more words. — Frank Bidart

I sat in a box
With walls on each side.
Not too tall.
Not too wide.
To think.
To ponder.
To pray.
To hide.
I sat in a box and cried. — Richelle E. Goodrich

It was more than a string of letters put together
it was a thick cloak in the cold
and a strong defense against an enemy
It was more than the naked heart on paper
it was a way to undress sadness ... and sins
and an olive branch for the desperate
Writing was her prayer
and the words were felt. — M.J. Abraham

Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce ... Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too. — Sarah Waters

And, of course, that is what all of this is - all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or simply to go on, senselessly, incomprehensibly, beatifically, in the face of mortality and the truth that our lives are more ill-writ, ill-rhymed and fleeting than any song, except perhaps those songs - that song, endlesly reincarnated - born of that truth, be it the moon and June of that truth, or the wordless blue moan, or the rotgut or the elegant poetry of it. That nameless black-hulled ship of Ulysses, that long black train, that Terraplane, that mystery train, that Rocket '88', that Buick 6 - same journey, same miracle, same end and endlessness. — Nick Tosches

The Offices rerooted me in a tradition where, monk or not, I would always be at home. From long ago I knew the power of their repetition, the incantatory force of the Psalms. But they had an added power now. As a kid, the psalmist (or psalmists) had seemed remote to me, the Psalms long prayers which sometimes rose to great poetry but often had simply to be endured. For a middle-aged man, the psalmists' moods and feelings came alive. One of the voices sounded a lot like a modern New Yorker, me or people I knew: a manic-depressive type A personality sometimes up, more often down, sometimes resigned, more often pissed off, railing about his sneaky enemies and feckless friends, always bitching to the Lord about the rotten hand he'd been dealt. That good old changelessness. — Tony Hendra

I've come down from the sky
like some damned ghost, delayed
too long ... To the abandoned fields
the trees returned and grew.
They stand and grow. Time comes
To them, time goes, the trees
Stand; the only place
They go is where they are.
Those wholly patient ones ...
They do no wrong, and they
Are beautiful. What more
Could we have thought to ask? ...
I stand and wait for light
to open the dark night.
I stand and wait for prayer
to come and find me here.
Sabbaths 2000 IX — Wendell Berry

I think poetry has started to take on a supplementary role of prayer for some people. The churches, I think, including my own, are terrible at teaching people how to pray. It may be that we need to learn from the ground up as religious people, whether Christian or not, how to pray. — Kevin Hart

It is, I believe, the primary charm of poetry to give the lesson of mirage, that is, to show the fragile and vibrant movement of creation, in which the word is in a certain way human quintessence, prayer. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

On faith's battered back calm eyes etch prayers that cool a nation's hot rage. — Aberjhani

You're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for. — Richard Siken

She stood upon a continent of ice, which sparkled between sea and sky, endless and dazzling, as though the world kept all its treasure there; a scale which balanced poetry and prayer. — Carol Ann Duffy

Poetry to me is prayer ... — Anne Sexton

Make me, dear Lord, polite and kind,
To everyone, I pray.
And may I ask you how you find
Yourself, dear Lord, today? — John B. Tabb