He kneels on a floor that knows his knees too well by now, the grooves worn into wood by decades of asking. Outside: four wars. Maybe five, depending on how you count the ones that don’t make the front page anymore. He doesn’t know how to hold all of it— Gaza, Ukraine, Lebanon, Iran, and the others with their ordinary names of streets and rivers and border crossings— so he holds none of it. Just opens his hands. Empty. That’s the whole prayer. His voice doesn’t rise. It comes out the way old bread breaks, without drama, just the crumb of a word landing somewhere below his ribs and staying. Peace. He says it. He says it again. Even he doesn’t believe repetition will fix anything; he’s read enough history for that. But what else? What else do you do at five in the morning when the news has already loaded and the photographs are already doing what photographs do? Once he thought prayer was a bridge. Now he thinks it’s more like breathing, not because it changes anything out there, but because you can’t stop doing it without dying. He says peace and feels it dissolve before it clears his teeth. He says it again. Somewhere a mother is standing in rubble that used to be a kitchen. She knows where the window was. She knows what the light did at certain hours. He doesn’t pretend his kneeling reaches her. He doesn’t pretend anything. He just keeps saying the word; worn down to almost nothing, small and calcium-pale, doing what a rib bone does: holding the soft things in.
Author’s Note
A Naomi Shihab Nye line made me pause: “Their prayers were weathered rib bones, small calcium words uttered in sequence.” From her poem “Different Ways to Pray.” I didn’t go looking for it. It found me the way certain lines do, at the wrong moment, which is usually the right one.
I kept turning it over. Calcium words. The idea that prayer could be skeletal—not luminous, not transcendent, just structural. Load-bearing. Something the body makes because it has to, not because it believes it will save anyone.
We are living in a time of multiple wars. I don’t think I need to list them again. Most of us are carrying them in some low-grade, helpless way: reading headlines before we’re fully awake, feeling the inadequacy of whatever we do next. Make coffee. Go to work. Say something, or say nothing.
The priest in this poem isn’t a figure of faith exactly. He’s a figure of persistence. He keeps saying the word peace knowing it dissolves, knowing his knees have worn grooves into the floor and the world hasn’t noticed. That felt true to me; truer than prayer as comfort, prayer as power, prayer as anything more than the stubborn, almost absurd act of not stopping.
Nye’s rib bone did the rest. Ribs hold soft things in. That’s the whole job.
Upcoming…
May’s writing prompt:
One Hundred-Word Wonders, 20 May 2026
This year, every prompt will come directly from movie titles.
For those who want a head start, this month’s prompt is: UNFORGIVEN. Write in exactly 100 words, a story, poem, or creative non-fiction in any genre, using the prompt. Pieces should be exactly 100 words, no more or less. The 100-word count does not include the title. Hold your piece until the 20th!
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Love that you’re audio-producing, too.