Better with Friends

Helen Losse begins her ten-page ten-part poem “”Where the Reverie is Apt to Lead” with the words:

This isn’t about prayer as such
but concerns the yellow flowers and the barking dog.

The poem is, of course, very much about prayer, and so is Helen’s entire collection Better with Friends (Rank Stranger Press, 2009) in which the poem appears.

Readers who know Helen’s work from her blog Windows Toward the World know that she is devoutly Christian, a reader of Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. Better with Friends opens with two epigrahs:

Pray without ceasing
— 1 Thessalonians 5:17

and

Prayer . . . transforms our vision [to] make us see all [people] and all the history in the light of God, able to enter . . . that inscrutable freedom which is at work [in all of] human existence.
— Thomas Merton

The opening section of the book is titled “Prayer at the Open Window.” Here are a few lines from the title poem:

In the solitude, I ponder life’s meaning.
I have looked but not really seen.
Because a window is open

does not mean the air is full of light.

. . . Surely, something
hides in the darkness like a shadow in the fog.

Significantly, the last poem in the collection is called “Prayer in the Fog” and ends with these words:

I embrace these shadows—

though they may be untrue—
for this is the first morning this week,
I have awakened to a fog, so penetrable
I can walk into it and set myself free.

So the book circles round and round the question of prayer.

Helen’s style is relaxed and conversational, as though a friend were talking to you quietly, telling you her sorrows and her stories. She tells stories of train watching — which is “Better with Friends” — of “Church, When They Had No Pianos”

Feel the beat. The backbeat.
Feel the beat. Stomp with the feet.

She eulogizes Rosa Parks and mourns for New Orleans. And every poem is a prayer: for the needy, for the excluded, for racial justice, for peace. Each poem is a witness, a psalm against forgetting.

The tenth and last section of “Where the Revery Is Apt Lead” :

Rumors of war happen daily; people ride bikes;
houses burn. But this is about where the reverie leads,

how the yellow flowers, the barking dog,
the poor cousins, every sun rise and sunset,

pond, lake, river, every person living
with trouble and laughter,

every memory, every color, every sound becomes
prayer—with God as witness—and this is about

when the lonely unite in unsullied silence
and open their windows toward the world.

Every poem in Better with Friends is an open window through which Helen sees the world with honest, compassionate eyes.

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