Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, February 3rd, 2025.

Today's poem comes from Scott Cairns, and it's called Possible Answers to Prayer.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.

Possible Ans answers to prayer.

Your petitions, though they continue to bear just the one signature, have been duly recorded.

Your anxieties, despite their constant, relatively narrow scope and inadvertent entertainment value,

nonetheless serve to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance, all but obscured beneath a burgeoning yellow fog of, frankly, more conspicuous resentment,

is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick, the suffering,

the needy poorer is sometimes recognizable to me, if not to them. Your angers, your zeal,

your lips-smackingly righteous indignation toward the many whose habits and sympathies offend you,

these must burn away before you'll apprehend how near I am,

with what fervor I adore precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.

This seemed like an appropriate poem to begin the week with, as for Christians, the world over the penitential

season of Lent begins this week. For Eastern Christians, it began this past Sunday with a

forgiveness vespers in which everyone in the church gathers together and asks, singly, individually,

one by one, each other's forgiveness,

the young and the old, the Russian and Ukrainian, the Eagles fans and Chiefs fans,

and then offers, in turn, their forgiveness with the declaration that it is God who forgives us all.

And it's a poignant reminder that many of the spiritual and metaphysical actions we perform or contemplate performing tend in our minds to be one-sided and in reality to be truly

...