A prayer usually lifts the eyes and asks for something distant. Jean Morton's «Prayer» does the opposite: it brings everything down to a thumb, a pair of eyes and a mouth. The speaker asks to be touched, bitten, watched and finally entered, and the title makes us read all of that as devotion. The poem never says who "you" is. Judging by the imagery, a lover is the obvious answer, but the word "prayer" leaves room for something larger. The tension between those two readings drives the whole poem.
The central idea is that the speaker wants to be completely received. The requests move from the edge of the body to its centre. They begin with "the thumb / of my hand", an almost awkwardly specific detail, since a thumb can hardly belong to anything but a hand. That small oddity makes the request feel unrehearsed, as if the speaker is naming whatever part is nearest. Then come "my eyes" and "my mouth", the places where a person is most visible and most able to speak. By the end the speaker no longer chooses a place at all: "anywhere / you fit in."
The poem's grammar charts this loosening of control. It opens with a question, "Will you not squeeze", and the phrasing sounds like someone who has waited a long time and is half-reproaching the other. Once the questions stop, the speaker is left with a polite command, "please enter", repeated twice. There is no question mark and no punctuation anywhere. The only capital letter is the first one. The poem runs on breath alone, so the speaker seems not to stop and weigh each word before speaking it.
The line breaks do much of the work. Most lines hold only two or three words, and some hold one. Reading them aloud forces a pause after "the thumb", after "bite it", after "my eyes". The isolated "and" is the clearest case. It hangs alone on its line like an indrawn breath before the plea turns from the hand to the mouth. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm is the halting rhythm of speech that is hard to say, which suits a poem about exposure.
Sound adds to the effect. "Squeeze" and "bite" are sharp, hissing, clipped, and they carry a hint of pain or pressure. "Please enter" is softer and more open, and the repeated "my mouth / please enter" works like a refrain or a liturgical response, the kind of phrase that gets said again because once is not enough. The poem's final word is "in", so the last thing the reader's voice does is move inward, enacting what the speaker asks for. "Fit in" also carries a quiet double meaning. It can describe a physical match, but it is also the everyday phrase for belonging. The speaker may be asking to be joined to someone and also to be accepted.
The detail "watch / my eyes / at the same time" may be the most revealing in the poem. The speaker does not want only to be touched. She or he wants to be seen while it happens, to have the touch and the gaze together and nothing hidden. That is a form of trust, and it connects the erotic surface of the poem to its religious title. Praying means addressing someone and trusting that you are heard. Here the speaker offers the body as the language of that address.
The poem matters because it will not separate the physical from the spiritual. It takes the humble, repeated form of a prayer and fills it with flesh, and the result is neither cheap nor comfortable. It is a picture of vulnerability, of wanting to be known so completely that no part of oneself is kept back. In under thirty words, it asks the reader to consider how closely longing for another person and longing for something greater can resemble each other.