Pilgrim prayer

I hold your silence like a small round stone, it goes with me wherever I go.

Waking, I wear it: its bounce on my breast a second pulse, call and response
of heart aching, rhythm breaking, the body’s drum beaten from both sides.

Or sometimes I clench its stone-cold sphere in the pit of my palm where it
steals my warmth. Little Slate Sun, Black-Hole-Born-in-Fire, feed on me.