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About Suffering​

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I heard on the radio that patients who are prayed for suffer less than those who receive no prayers. Studies have been performed with extreme care: the prayerless were kept in isolated hospital wings with a sign that said no visitors, phone messages, cards, chicken soup, flowers, silk pajamas, all of which are listed as popular forms of prayer in the latest edition of A Field Guide to Prayers.

Other common forms of prayers: snow globes, caged birds, fountain pens, unlined paper, poems.

Even colors are listed as prayers, especially yellow and pink, reminding one of the various presences of the divine. The walls of the hospital rooms for the prayerless were painted in Benjamin Moore’s London Fog, said to be the color of solitude. And doubt.

Agnosticism is ash gray, one shade lighter on the color wheel. Belief, of course, is gold.

Day by day the prayerless sank inside their skin like balloons with pinhole leaks. Usually, they slept without waking, but if they woke, it was only for a few minutes before they drifted off again. One child never returned. She slipped through a window in the air.  

 

 

Nin Andrews is the author of fifteen poetry collections including Son of a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poems, published in 2025. Her poetry has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, Agni, The Paris Review, and four editions of Best American Poetry.

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