“Prayers of Steel” - Carl Sandburg

“Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
[…]
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.”

- Carl Sandburg

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A specific kind of prayer this Sunday…

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Sandburg doesn’t pray for his own intervention, but to become an instrument of intervention.

In stanza 1, he asks to be a crowbar: to “pry loose” walls, “lift and loosen” foundations. But I am most moved by stanza 2, in which he doesn’t ask to be ARCHITECT of the new structure, but to take a humble place as PART of it. He prays to be “driven” into a skyscraper’s girders, fastened with “red-hot rivets” to its core. While recognizing the pain of transformation (beaten at the anvil), he imagines his reward as being buried in the building, holding it together.

What faith that the skyscraper can surpass “blue nights” to reach “white stars.”

Sandburg uses repetition for emphasis (image 2, yellow). This performs the grind of growth and rebuilding. He also harnesses the imagery of Christ’s Passion. The speaker suffers bodily breakdown for spiritual reincarnation and societal salvation; he prays to be “fastened” with red-hot rivets to a beam, a clear invocation of the cross (image 2, blue). A sobering vision of the Christian mandate to “follow Christ.” Something every elected official “sending prayers” should tremble at.

I don’t know if I can pray like this. I fear there’s always a piece of me hoping to skip the beating/hammering, or the responsibility of rebuilding (so much easier to tear down). I fear I secretly hope to end up at the top of the tower, not in a weight-bearing girder.

But this is where the anvil comes in. In Sandburg’s metaphor, God is Smith, and Narrator is metal. What is the anvil? I’m realizing the anvil is what hurts more than the beating. It is too uncompromising, too painful to retreat into. I am learning through my son, who has taught me a ferocity of love that translates abstractions – like a school shooting – into unbearable realities. And who gives me the motivation to reforge my life in ways big and small. If I am not yet brave enough to offer myself as “nail,” today I can at least pray to be able to.