The Prayer Wind (from The Clan of the Lichens)

Opal Whiteley (1897-1992), child literary prodigy and acclaimed Oregon naturalist, was famous for her bestselling childhood diary (1920), but also wrote much poetry. This poem, extracted from her little-known collection The Flower of Stars, was written when Whiteley was in her early 20’s. Whiteley’s unique and consistent mythology permeates all of her writing, and this poem is no exception. She often returns to such themes as the universal journey of man, the substantive nature of time, the purity of the color blue, the instinctual understanding of children, the music of the solar system, and a host of metaphors from nature to illuminate personal relationships. After a tremendous scandal in which the true authorship of Whiteley’s celebrated journal was questioned, she became virtually unknown and died in 1992 in a London asylum.