Prayer at Big Creek

During the pandemic I figured that if I died, I would die alone. I was that isolated most of the time. On March 4 two years ago my worst fear began to happen. I couldn’t regulate my heart rate or breathing. I fell down, then crawled on the couch. I kept a phone in my hand. After a few seconds I decided to call 911.

I’m having a heart attack, I told the dispatcher. She got the details quickly, calmly, then said something that sounded to me as close as I’ll ever get to hearing angels.

“I won’t leave you, Mark. I’ll be right here with you until the paramedics arrive. Don’t leave me.”

I did leave, several times. Each time I came back, I heard her say, “I’m still here, Mark.”

At the threshold of consciousness, as I slipped back and forth between two worlds, I put my mind in the best place I could imagine, a marsh on Lake Erie called Big Creek. I knew I’d find cranes waiting for me.

I cannot say whether I prayed for them, or to them, or with them. The cant of words doesn’t matter. I believe in the still, small voice. I believe what the poet Yehuda Amichai said. Gods come and go. Prayer is eternal.

I wrote “Prayer at Big Creek” a week later when I came home from the hospital. I recite it every day in a quiet moment. I will recite it every day for as many days as are left to me.

Prayer at Big Creek

Sandhill cranes
I hear them coming across
nine million years
I hear them before
I see them

Overhead now, guttural clamor
Soaring, streaming waves of birds
undulating across horizons

They are flying toward God
in the still sedges
at the heart of the marsh

They are flying toward God
and they are taking me with them

—–

Copyright 2021, 2023 by  Mark Willis

About the Image: Sandhill cranes fly across a sunset sky over the Platte River near Gibbon, Nebraska. [Photo by Lori Porter| Source: Kearney Hub]