Like light beyond “the visible spectrum,”
prayer goes up from the nursing home
from this detritus, these cast aside.
Ones I loved who committed the wrong,
the great estrangement, of living
too long, they too sent up from this
foreign land, their exile, the vast
supplication of extreme humanity:
Help me. Help us. Help the dying
to die. Help the dead to live. Maybe
they have dwindled to final care, to
final prayer. Maybe they have come
to the final freedom, no longer wanting
time, no longer wanting. From the farms
and little towns they have been
gathered unto this last. Low down
as its source may be, their prayer
ascends, it rises as out of the grace,
it is a glory of the earth. If this is not
true, what do I know that is?
— Wendell Berry