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  • Unsaid Prayers
  • Bruce Bond (bio)

Kafka

The world loves the sin, hates the sinner.Guilt, after all, is gold. Ask the childwho lays a coin across his father’s stare.A small man makes his savior personal,the vast distance between them the sizeof some fantasy of power. My God,he says, when death takes him by surprise.For even shame is not without its pride.It makes use of most anything around it.But you know this, you who wander the fogin search of the love you cannot accept.Do you hear them, the typewriters of Prague,as they write the cruel dead in their heaven?Do you say your prayers by never saying them?

The Burning Cross

When I was a child, I washed my sinsbeneath a cross with a fire in the center,the abstract gold of it bodiless, bare,no bright blood to desecrate the monstrance.Always that suffering yet to be visible,and the cross needed me to see it there,to give the past its flesh, its breath, its future.So, when I saw for the first time the symboltorched to ashes on my neighbor’s lawn,I thought of bodies consumed in light of it,how fire ate so that it might be eaten [End Page 207] to ruin the image it printed on the dark,everywhere the fury of confused glarethat scorched the eye of its imagined savior.

The Red Coat

—for Gavriel Bach

It took a year of testimony to hangEichmann for what was all too obvious,not because his guilt was in question,but the number sufficient to witness was,the under-oath, the overseas, the roomflush with some five million who livedin us, in the unborn who took their namesfrom numbers far too godly to believe.So, when the father told of his girl’s redcoat, how as they took her it grew smallinto the trainloads of the future dead,the prosecutor stood silent, less for allthan one, and one, the lantern of the coatso like his daughter’s it cut his throat. [End Page 208]

Grace

My father’s God had no name, no placeat the table, save in the silent gracethat closed our eyes, bowed our heads, listened,as we too would listen, waiting for amen.Sometimes I felt the dog between my legsnose my fingers open, and I beggedher to stop, then egged her on again.Sometimes the hole in our conversationbrought us close to darkness in each other.Who knows what my father thought in there.So when the spell was broken and his bladeshuddered through the meat of the bird,I thanked him—or them. I thanked both fathers,the one godless, the other one unheard. [End Page 209]

Bruce Bond

Bruce Bond, regents professor at University of North Texas, is the author of fourteen books, including Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan Press) and For the Lost Cathedral (lsu Press).

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