Author: Neal Saye

I have recently started getting a beautiful weekly poem service provided by a pre-retirement colleague of mine from Georgia Southern University.

This week’s poem is titled, “Perseverance Prayer.”

“There is no one who has not their hour and no thing that has not its place.” —Pirkei Avot, 4:3

Perseverance Prayer

Be it rug or couch or bed, the dog
can’t help but turn and turn and turn again
before lying down, his angle always

a little off, the vantage never
quite as desired. Still the ritual persists.
Yet once in a prairie gone tall

with summer, high grass whispering
with afternoon breeze, he began—one, two,
three times around—and the stalks found

new joints with each of his orbits, swaying,
kneeling, prostrating away from him into
a massive golden wreath, an ideal bed.

A pursuit others call pointless is often just
the right action in need of its right place.

–Jessica Jacobs
from Unalone (Four Way Books, 2024)

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel that I am going round and round and round in circles and not exactly sure where to land.

But I believe there is a “right place.”