© 2009 Roger Davies

Prayer in the Form of Cranes
     Prayer for the Future
            Prayer Spoken into the Dreamtime

The paper cranes
flutter down
into the future,
extending their legs
to touch the Earth.

Yet first they fly back,
through time

from the vast skies
of prayer.

Their careful fold lines
are being spirited
into sinew
and into
the living bones of flight.

Their bright
and hopeful surfaces
evoke themselves
into feathers,
seeking life in air.

It is the moment
of a thousand muscled
wings moving.

A thousand times a thousand
white Cranes step into
morning air.

They are flying now,
rising high in the heat
over the unfused
sands of Alamogordo

They are circling
the Quonset huts
of Los Alamos
and the prophecies
of the ancients.

They are heading
toward the internment
compounds of the American
dispossessed.

They are flying
up the Potomac
and over the fissionable
thoughts imploding
in the oval office

They are coming
to the Atolls of the Pacific
and the tarmacs
and the bombsights
that can see no child

They circle over Father George Zabelka,
who blessed the bomb and the bomber
and the men who drove it, and who
later repented for his sin

They have reached
the wingtips
of the Enola Gay.
The Cranes reach out
to one another in spirit language.

Now they are about to fly
under death's metallic imagination.

They are raising evil
out of its own way.
The altimeters
and the pilots
and the crazed generals
have lost their voices
to the songs of birds.

The Cranes
are lifting
the U.S. Air force
to a thousand Crane sky.

Over Hiroshima
the one and only sun
rises.

The waters
of the Motoyasu River
flow gently
by the domed building.

The smallest children
lift their clear and shining eyes
and their small faces
to the Cranes

Amen

It is a day
for Crane observing

Amen

It is a day
to move the ten fingers
of your perfect two hands

Amen

It is a day
to make careful folds
from kind memories

Amen

It is a day
to learn the patterns
of peace

Amen

It is a day to reach out
to the children of the future,
saying "Not one of you will be
born to the slow death
of radiation"

Amen

It is a day
the cranes cry out
the one incessant dream
of the Hibakusha

Amen

It is a day
when Peace will be born
in the shape of a Crane

Amen