Читать книгу I Call to You from Time - Judith Sornberger - Страница 9

Each night when I was eight

I lay me down to pray:

Bless Mom and Dad and Jen and Jill,

bless Mona and Granddad, bless . . .

Oh, the list would bore you.

And each night the arms of my prayer

reached farther and farther beyond the cave

of covers, past our house, our city, our country . . .

Everything, even the stars, needed my blessing.

My parents were watching the news

when I called out: In a few minutes

tell me to stop saying my prayers.

My fervor frightened them.

Now there is a term for it:

obsessive-compulsive disorder.

But it was order I believed in,

and I was at its center.

Then one day without warning

the fever of my faith broke,

and I was cured. I was grown

and had a life like many others:

husband, job, two children.

And I knew how not to pray.

But tonight on the news there is war:

a broken face I can’t stand to see.

A POW—a pilot—his shoulders

folded in like ruined wings.

There is an enemy. There must be.

They are his torturers.

Or they are my leaders.

Or it is the camera—an eye like God’s

that sees pain and accepts it

Of one thing I am certain:

this man suffers for our sins—

but which ones: omission or commission?

Obsession or compulsion? There must be

some disorder we can name it, and some cure

for how we lay us down, for how we sleep.