Replenishment: A prayer after Melissa

Home is where / one starts from.

Raise the Nile to its measures, according to Your grace O Lord

Give joy to the face of the earth

May its furrows be abundantly watered and its fruits be plentiful

Prepare the land for sowing and harvesting

Manage our lives as deemed fit.

Coptic Prayer

Up a Cane River to wash my dreads

Upon a rock I rest my head

Bob Marley, Trench Town

May Cane River continue to seep into the dark soil.

May rainfall replenish the mountain streams.

May the green of restoration wildly spread

across the broken land. May the seeds

we plant burst with vitality and substance.

Hallelujah! Amen! Hallelujah! Amen!

All my life the planting of seeds begins with an amen

or some good luck ritual to conjure the soil

to have mercy on the seeds – to yield the substance

of things hoped for. I had no flowing streams

of a farmer’s assurance. Gardens meant seeds

like dice and prayers that some mercy would spread.

I would scatter the seeds and tenderly pat and spread

the dark soil. Stand, clap my hands and say, “Amen!”

For I knew my history of failure, when I blamed the seeds

for being deceptions, or announced the soil

to be cursed. And to compensate I’d pour streams

of water on the bald ground. No yield, no sprouting substance;

just rot and silence. I longed then for the substance

of Coptic prayers, each mornings liturgy spread

over the living and the dead in earnest streams

praying, “Nile, oh Nile, be green sprouting, amen!”

I envy those saints who pray each day for the fecund soil

to yield as covens of women pray for wombs to seed.

But I am a city dweller, with a fist full of brittle seeds,

making my way into the hills to deliver their substance

to the survivors: the cracked roads and upturned soil,

the shattered tree trunks naked of leaves and the spread

of destruction. At the path’s bend I whisper a heavy amen,

a deep sigh when I see the Cane River’s streams

of water tumbling down. I know that these streams

of water are the substance of chaos and the hope for thirsty seeds.

They are the grace and the mercy, they are the Amen

of the people’s prayers, they are the substance

of what is hoped for. At the slippery banking I spread

my arms wide and say, “Dear god, replenish this soil,

replenish this broken ground, birth seeds with streams

of good water to spread the substance of faith – the soil’s Amen – over this broken island, we say, amen.”

– Kwame Dawes

Poet Laureate of Jamaica, 2025-2028