Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul

There is a beautiful set of essays over at The Poetry Foundation website by the poet Edward Hirsch called "How to Read a Poem (and Fall in Love with Poetry)." The first essay, "Heartland," begins like this:

Read these poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you’re alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you’re wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture—the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us—has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you. I think of Malebranche’s maxim, “Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.” This maxim, beloved by Simone Weil and Paul Celan, quoted by Walter Benjamin in his magisterial essay on Franz Kafka, can stand as a writer’s credo. It also serves for readers. Paul Celan said:

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense, too, are under way: they are making toward something.

If that doesn't make you want to put everything else away and go pick a book of poetry off the shelf, well... you're hopeless. If you don't have a book of poetry, just go to the Poetry Foundation website. Whatever you do, pray.