God, the time to sleep has come for me at last;
this day, though blest, has been a weary one.
Both pain and gain I had beneath the sun,
and now I close with thanks for what has passed:
You gave me breath to walk, and work, and sing.
On wicked words and deeds, please, mercy show.
You gave me light to see, and know, and go.
I wanted more; I could have had much less.
You gave me hope, enduring in distress;
above all things it kept me fighting sin.
You gave me love—of beauty, kith, and kin,
delights enkindling love of You, my King.
So many were your perfect gifts as through the day I pressed.
With gratitude I gently go most sweetly to my rest.
—David Jackson Lohnes
2022
Notes:
I’m having to learn how to pray again. There are certain things I want to communicate to God, and I’m still figuring out what those things are and how to express them. I’ve never been a liturgical prayer before, but as I try to weave prayer into my daily routine, I’m turning to prayer sonnets. The length is just right, the meter and rhyme help me memorize them, and the formal constraints help focus my thinking as I write them. This one is a match for the morning prayer from a few days ago.
The rhyme scheme of the first quatrain, ABBA, is a way of calling God Father without calling Him Father. I still struggle with that.
the time for sleep has come for me — This is an end of day prayer. It is also an end of life prayer.
Both pain and gain — Natural, even common, language. This is me talking to God, not reciting Shakespeare.
I like how the rhyme scheme during the couplets of thanks pull you from one couplet right into the next while allowing the second line of each to respond to the first line with a little bit of a counter sound. I feel like it gives movement without letting things become rote and singsong.
I wanted more — Pretty much every day I encounter some thing I wish I knew more about or was better at. The desire to know more has been perhaps the dominant emotional and spiritual urge my entire life. During the decade of doubt and sadness, my doubts were almost entirely intellectual. They still are. Yet I’m only given what I’m given, and historically speaking, it’s been an astronomical amount.
You gave me hope — I have struggled on the abyss of hopelessness for a long time. Being able to say “I have hope” is a daily victory and goal.
perfect gifts — James 1:17
gently go — I love Dylan Thomas’s poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” but I don’t agree with it. Just as I happily go to to sleep at the end of a long day, even so I want to be able to go gently to my grave final rest.
sweetly to my rest – In Hamlet, the rest is the rest of death. But we all know (or at least all us working adults know) how sweet sleep is at the end of the day—even though too often I have delayed it with pointless doomscrolling. If at the end of my last day these are the last words I ever speak, it won’t feel inappropriate to have referenced Shakespeare. English words have ever been my strength and delight.