Poem made a difference: Mae Shaw on the remarkable power of Prayer

WHO can honestly say, however happy their life, that they haven't been through tough times? Most people would also agree that often, a small and seemingly unimportant event can make us realise life's not so bad after all.

That's precisely why Mae Shaw, of Portobello, chose Carol Ann Duffy's poem Prayer for the Carry A Poem campaign, running city-wide throughout February.

The campaign, organised by the City of Literature Trust, asked people, both celebrities and non, to select a poem which had a special meaning for them. The best, including Mae's, have ended up in a book, thousands of copies of which are being distributed free across the city as part of the campaign.

Mae, a senior lecturer in community education at the Moray House School of Education, came across the poem at what she calls a "difficult time" when a relationship spilt meant she had prime responsibility for her son. "I found myself virtually a single parent and the future looked as if it was going to be a bit of a struggle. The first verse just leapt out at me. That woman with her head in the 'sieve of her hands' was me. And yet, by the end of the verse we have been re-directed to 'a sudden gift'," she writes in the book.

"It just reminded me of what I knew to be true, but had, in misery, forgotten: the triumph of the human spirit in spite of the most grim situations. We sometimes just can't help ourselves being lifted by the most simple and surprising small pleasure - and they are doubly precious at such times."

Mae, who moved to England from Northern Ireland in 1972, then to Edinburgh in 1979, has a happy ending for her story - her son is grown-up at university and is a "delightful, imaginative, sensible and happy person".

For more information, visit www.carryapoem.com

Prayer

by Carol Ann Duffy

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer

utters itself. So, a woman will lift

her head from the sieve of her hands and stare

at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth

enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;

then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth

in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade One piano scales

console the lodger looking out across

a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls

a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer –

Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.