V. H. King's Ink

Of the many challenges in my creative pursuits, I most often struggle to come up with a title. From short stories to paintings to poetry, I find myself stumped.  What am I going to call this thing?

Every now and then, a title jumps out from a particular line of dialogue or from a description.  Sometimes I workshop potential phrases and somehow end up with a whole other poem—one I still have to title. LitMiH’s title, however, came about somewhere in between painting and praying during the summer of 2020.

As a phrase, “Late in the midnight hour” is often heard in African American churches. It refers to being in a terrible place—mentally, emotionally, spiritually. The midnight hour is when everything that could possibly go wrong has already happened. Somehow you still have to face whatever is coming next, and you have absolutely no idea how you’re going to do that. What do you do when “time’s up” was decades ago?

There is no shortage of grief for everything lost to 2020.  From lives ripped apart to every lesson learned the hard way, the scar of that endless year is felt across every inch of the globe. I spent a lot of summer afternoons wailing wordlessly, moving through the maze of my grief with a pencil or a paintbrush in hand. As always, I was listening to music—and that year, I had started listening to the gospel music I had grown up on. 

In between Kanye West and Kid Cudi, I shuffled Kirk Franklin and Fred Hammond.  My music ranged from the year I was born to the latest singles, a decade and a half of anger and anthems. My playlists inspired the name of this poetry series as much as my painting did.  This Too is Prayer refers to all the ways I’ve found myself praying—not just with words, not just in poems and stories, but in turning up music loud enough that it becomes the arms of every ancestor holding me together, lifting me up, pulling me above the waves.

Prayer wasn’t something I ever did very well in church. It’s still not something I feel well-equipped to do, if the expectation is for me to open my mouth and make words come out.  Watching a sunset though? Listening to the air-compression brakes from tractor-trailers snoring their way down the interstate? That was prayer.

Gripping my sheets when UPS cargo planes shuddered my apartment? Holding my breath with the certainty that it wasn’t a plane but another tornado, except this time I wouldn’t live through it? Gasping for air in case it wasn’t a tornado but bomber planes instead, dropping hellfire for miles? All of that was prayer.

The anger that burned the back of my throat as I worked through stack after stack of paperwork to keep my tongue from spewing expletives when the director said to keep business as usual? That was prayer.  The comfort of 90s gospel music I hadn’t heard for a dozen years? That was prayer.  The cold kiss of steel in my palm as I debated how many scars I would take with me from that awful year? Prayer.

At some point, I combed through the poems and artwork I had accumulated over an eighteen-month period, and I realized I had more than just one poetry collection on my hands. I separated posts and essays and sketches and scribbles by category, and the themes mirrored a familiar cycle of struggling for faith in the depths of despair. Somehow, eventually, I would find my way to faith again—but faith in what? God? Goodness? Heaven? Humanity? The answer depends on the day of the week and whether or not I’ve had coffee and how badly I need a hug and when was the last time I saw the sun.

About two-thirds into the song We’re Blessed by Fred Hammond comes this promise: Late in the midnight hour, God’s going to turn it around. I listened to that song a lot over the summer, often three times in a row before letting shuffle take the wheel again. I did not feel blessed in 2020. I’m not even sure I believed in blessings—at least, none on this side of mortality. The spirit of the song, and of that lyric in particular, has stuck with me despite my ambivalence.

I didn’t write LitMiH to promise things would be alright. I wrote it so I would stay alive. I wrote it to keep trying, even when I was afraid of failure and rejection and dismissal and erasure. I wrote it as a prayer and a plea. I wrote it because the world is terrifying, and because I choose to believe life is still worth living until the very end.