Prayer to the Invisible
For Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz
I write your name where no one can read it.
In the sky behind a cloud
on a stone. I write your name
in the footprints
of a tortoise walking back
into the ocean.
When you came to me in a dream
from the other place,
I told you how much I missed you.
You let me know
you can do even more healing
where you are now, out of your body.
A year after the synagogue shooting,
you embrace your friends at the Tree of Life
as they are saying Kaddish for you –
where we sit all day and name the dead.
You whisper to your wife
who is living in a shadow,
sitting alone on the tapestry sofa
where she sat with you.
Our prayers grow out of the shadow
of necessity. Our music
floats above the burden we carry
even though you want us to release it.
I carry your spirit on my shoulders
as I walk into the synagogue
where we played music for you,
as I follow an eclipse north
as I walk into a dream.
I write your name in the sky after midnight
in the Leonid meteor showers,
in the penumbra of an eclipse
of the wolf moon.
Your name is inside the music
I play for you on my cello.
I write your name in the invisible
where you disappeared that morning
where your spirit flew into a cloud.
I write your name
in an ice halo around the moon
and my prayer that this planet
will one day, like an amaryllis,
bloom again.
— Diane Frank
