The Bigness of Small Poems – #38 in a Series – Jane Hirschfield’s Poem, Late Prayer

American Poet and Essayist Jane Hirschfield

Late Prayer

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally
Including rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
A single nail, a single ruby –
All the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.

Jane Hirschfield from Lives of the Heart, Harper Collins, 1997

I have long liked, yet have been disturbed, also, by this poem of Jane Hirschfield’s. Like many of her poems which feel more like engimas, it resists my easy understanding. And I have been troubled with its title, Late Prayer, as I struggle with its contentions. How could this be a prayer, late or early?

My biggest surprise begins with its first-word-first-line abstraction that seems so removed from the end of its proper sentence. That’s where she cold cocks me. As planned, I imagine. Her declaration:

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally
Including rabbit and hawk.

It’s the conjunction of tenderness with hawk that confounds me. The striking image evoked when hawk and rabbit are mentioned together, an image of a hawk killing a rabbit. How does a hawk with its lethal ferocity become a use chosen from tenderness? And how is this a prayer?

I asked that question here in Tuscany at dinner where I am part of the In Situ artist’s and writer’s residency with six others, And a young man, writer and graphic artist, responded without hesitation that the act of killing by the hawk to feed itself and its young is in itself an act of tenderness for life. True. The same tenderness that fed me chicken and vegetables this evening.

As I listened to the young man I understood my reaction to the poem is the poem’s point. One is impossible without the other but I do not like living in the consciousness of this!

I have a lot easier time with the contrasting images in the poem’s next proper sentence:

Look: in the iron bucket,
A single nail, a single ruby –
All the heavens and hells.

Because I am not complicit in these contrasts, the duality of crude nail and beautiful ruby, these heavens and hells, I rest easier with them. But when I add rabbit and hawk it gets messy; and the last line, a lot closer to the bone. They [the heavens and hells] rattle in the heart and make one sound. Yes, the sound of the anguished cry in my heart knowing one act of tenderness is also an act of terror. A hawk and rabbit.

These aren’t new understandings. But Hirschfield puts me in the vice of this duality and turns it until I hurt:

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally
Including rabbit and hawk.

And how is this a prayer, late or otherwise? I assume late refers to a prayer, late in the sense she was in her forties when she wrote this. She had a lot more experience then of life’s opposing dualities. If I imagine prayer as some do – a listening to God, to the Beloved, to a Higher Power, to the Creator – this seems like a call, a prayer to wake up.  A call for fierce acceptance of the yes and no that underlies this world I live in. This is no simple asking to change it or make it better. It is a prayer of hard-earned acceptance of a world with all its heavens and hells.

I hesitate responding with a new poem of my own in response to a poem by a poet as fine as Hirschfield but it’s how I started to have a conversation with it. It took me to an utterly unexpected place as so many of my poems do.

I am here in Tuscany with Christian artists and writers but even then, my last line surprised me. I do feel a mysterious, Divine presence in the making of my own poems and feel it often in the poems of others. And I do lead Poetry-as-Prayer retreats but I am not used to such explicitly religious expression in my own poems!

Late Prayer
After Reading Hirschfield’s Poem,
Late Prayer

Who will understand me
if I say no
prayer is late or early.

Late in the Tuscan daylight
the rain, the same
as it was this morning,
its falling full of its own uses. 

Late or early, these failures I collect,
full of their own uses. Beloved,

have mercy.