The Locksmith's Prayer

He keeps a drawer of old keys like teeth in a jar: brass and bent,  
each one nicked by the insistence of some lock. When the church roof leaked,  
he harvested gutters, carried ladders, coughed confession into the rafters.

On Tuesday he opens his shop behind a grocery; the bell over the door  
rings like a thin steeple. A woman brings a trunk sealed by grief:  
“This belonged to my mother,” she says. “I can’t open it.”

He polishes the lock with a rag, hums an old hymn under his breath,  
and listens to the hinge as if it might have a pulse. With one patient twist  
a thing inside the wood gives: papers, a ribbon, a photograph of a boy  
making mud pies in a yard that still smells like summer.

She does not seem surprised; she is relieved as if a map appeared.  
Whole continents of memory, long folded, unfold along her lap.  
He hands her the key. “Take it.” He takes no fee. Payment is the way a body relaxes  
when some weight at last lightens.

That night he prays over the drawer of keys, naming each by use: house, barn, ledger;  
and holds the smallest between thumb and nail, offering it like a coin: “Lord, I keep what you give me.  
Let these open what is closed.” In sleep a neighbor’s laugh slips through fences,  
a child knocks at a door that had been quiet. He wakes, the keys warm in his hand,  
and knows: to keep a key is sometimes the same as keeping a promise; to open is always prayer.


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David Anson Lee is a physician and writer whose work often explores the intersection of faith, memory and the healing arts. Born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, he now lives in Texas, where he writes poetry and fiction grounded in gratitude, attention and the quiet movements of grace. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals.