No. 64

The bus driver, Black Mother, waits
For the train to arrive,
The passengers to become her children:
She remembers me, calls out my stop,
"Santa Clara and First,"
Not far from St. James' Park,
Historic San Jose.

She watches me leave and carries
The other children of her run
To their appointed places,
Heavy in her heart
For the daughter who suffers
From surgery, from chemo, from surgery.

Dear Mother of God, how beautiful
You are in the Cathedral of St. Joseph:
What street of this besainted city
Will you name for the Black Mother,
Who cannot save her daughter from pain,
Who drives her bus so kindly,
Speaking gently to the old White Woman,
Who, like herself, cannot save her
Daughter from pain?

[Poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann. May, 1995. Photo of the Virgin of Montserrat via Wikimedia.]

A Prayer for the Word Processor

Oh word of God, bestowed to man and woman,
Chiefly woman now, protect us from the machine
That wants to think for us, to remember for us,
To remember the errors of our ways and erase
Them before the impulse exists (to put all our
Works into one access, random if possible)
To know not the paragraph, for it may transfer
To another page or the scratch of the pen,
For it is slow and leaves the sign of old ideas.

Protect us Lord God from preserving our printouts
Forever, for they are not worthy;
Protect us from believing that all words are spelled
Equally, that electronic impulses are more precious
Than rubies, more meaningful than the handwritten note.

In our late middle age we have learned to eat
Bread without salt, drink coffee without cream
For thus we mean to live forever.

Preserve us from processing the words of our hearts
And knowing not whereof they came.

[Poem by Virginia McKinnon Mann; dated May, 2006. Photo by Haris Awang.]