A Prayer to Talk to Animals
Lord, I ain’t asking to be the Beastmaster
gym-ripped in a jungle loincloth
or a Doctor Dolittle or even the expensive vet
down the street, that stethoscoped redhead,
her diamond ring big as a Cracker Jack toy.
All I want is for you to help me flip
off this lightbox and its scroll of dread, to rip
a tiny tear between this world and that, a slit
in the veil, Lord, one of those old-fashioned peeping
keyholes through which I can press my dumb
lips and speak. If you will, Lord, make me the teeth
hot in the mouth of a raccoon scraping
the junk I scraped from last night’s plates,
make me the blue eye of that young crow cocked to
me—too selfish to even look up from the black
of my damn phone. Oh, forgive me, Lord,
how human I’ve become, busy clicking
what I like, busy pushing
my cuticles back and back to expose
all ten pale, useless moons. Would you let me
tell your creatures how sorry
I am, let them know exactly
what we’ve done? Am I not an animal
too? If so, Lord, make me one again.
Give me back my dirty claws and blood-warm
horns, braid back those longfrayed
endings of every nerve tingling
with all I thought I had to do today.
Fork my tongue, Lord. There is a sorrow on the air
I taste but cannot name. I want to open
my mouth and know the exact
flavor of what’s to come, I want to open
my mouth and sound a language
that calls all language home.
This poem is excerpted from The Gift of Animals: Poems of Love, Loss, and Connection (Storey Publishing, 2025), edited by Alison Hawthorne Deming, a unique collection of poems from diverse contemporary voices that offers a range of perspectives on humans’ complex relationship with animals, celebrating and bearing witness to the lives of animals both wild and domestic.
This is the second of four poems from the anthology (plus our podcast) reprinted in Terrain.org over the second week of November 2025.
“A Prayer to Talk to Animals” was first published in To Those Who Were Our First Gods (Rattle, 2018).
Nickole Brown is author of Sister as well as Fanny Says, which won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. To Those Who Were Our First Gods won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published in 2020. Her poem “Parable” won the 2024 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize. Currently, she lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she’s president of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, a nonprofit that aims to nurture a community hellbent on finding the words that protect and repair our climate-changed world.
Header photo by Ralph, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Nickole Brown by Donald Schuster.
