Day of the Dead
November 2, 2009/
…
We speak our dead here, voices praying back to us praying
“as it is in heaven,”—fragment of first poetry lodged in my throat
before I learned the prayer as the Lord’s, it was ours.
And I try to make, do “as it is,” close as I can to you and me,
child tongue still stumbling over the syllables towards heaven.
Ashley Makar works with refugees in Connecticut. She does community outreach for IRIS--Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services, in New Haven. She has an e-book of essays, You Were Strangers: Dispatches from Exile. Ashley has published essays in Tablet, The Birmingham News, The Struggle Continues (the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute weblog), Religion Dispatches, and The New Haven Register.