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Poem-a-Day - "A Prayer" by Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr.

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August 29, 2020  

A Prayer
Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr.

As I lie in bed,
Flat on my back;
There passes across my ceiling
An endless panorama of things—
Quick steps of gay-voiced children,
Adolescence in its wondering silences,
Maid and man on moonlit summer’s eve,
Women in the holy glow of Motherhood,
Old men gazing silently thru the twilight
Into the beyond.
O God, give me words to make my dream-children live.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 29, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“A Prayer” originally appeared in The Band of Gideon (Cornhill Publishing Company, 1918).
Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr. was born on September 2, 1895, in Louisville, Kentucky. The author of The Band of Gideon (Cornhill Publishing Company, 1918), he worked as an editor and writer for the Louisville Leader. He died on February 3, 1919.

The Band of Gideon
(Cornhill Publishing Company, 1918)

Black Lives Matter Anthology


“Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—”

—“I, Too” by Langston Hughes
“If I Had Known” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson
read more
“Rhapsody” by William Stanley Braithwaite
read more

Thanks to A. H. Jerriod Avant, PhD candidate at the University of Rhode Island, who curated Poem-a-Day for August 17-August 28. Read a Q&A about Avant’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year. 
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