Hear Me

Hear me, Lord, for I am a sinner, which means I have nothing except prayer.

Protect me from the day of dryness and impotence.

When neither a swallow's flight nor peonoes, daffodils and irises in the flower marhet are a sign of Your glory.

When I will be surrounded by scoffers and unable, against their arguments, to remember any miracle of Yours.

When I will seem to myself an imposter and swindler because I take part in religious rites.

When I will accuse You of establishing the universal law of death.

When I am ready at last to bow down to nothingness and call life on earth a devil's vaudeville.

~ Czeslaw Milosz.

I discovered this poem in an anthology of this 1980 Nobel Literature Prize winner when I was searching the library for Polish literature.