Anno Domini 2004, and: My Sister Tells Me Her Prayer about the World of Men
- Anno Domini 2004, and: My Sister Tells Me Her Prayer about the World of Men
Anno Domini 2004
The large brown spider hunts freely in our crawl space.
A gray squirrel dies beside our road. On morning walks, I watch its lithe body collapse in the grass.
My wife and I share our woods with a white-tailed doe. She will birth two fawns, their slender ankles smaller than my thumb’s muscle. One fawn will starve before the year’s out.
After a dry spell, hard rains soak the ground. Come spring, our dogwood tree erupts in red-and-white blossoms.
In another part of the world, something else falls from the sky. Something else blooms.
This year, so many shapely bodies wither, dangle, or die. Oh Lord, so many deaths to be added up and numbered. [End Page 680]
My Sister Tells Me Her Prayer about the World of Men
Lord, let my body no longer betray me. Lord, let me be transparent. Let a man unburden and confess he’s waited for me his whole life.
Lord, let me welcome a husband home from work. Let us sit together on the couch, turn off the TV. Lord, let us be quiet.
In bed, in the dark, Lord, let my husband hold me and for once let a man know the difference between his body and mine. [End Page 681]
Martin Lammon’s first book of poems, News from Where I Live, won the Arkansas Poetry Award. He teaches at Georgia College, where he holds the Fuller E. Callaway/Flannery O’Connor Chair in Creative Writing. Recent poems and essays have appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, The Iowa Review, and Mid-American Review.
