1.
If you’re listening, O Lord, hear my prayer:
Let them fail.
Let them fall on their faces and be humiliated.
Let them disappoint us and fill us with anger.
Let them root around in the mud of politics.
Let them be embroiled in scandal.
Let them be exposed as the human beings they are.
Let us curse their names.
Let us wish they’d never been born.
Let us wonder what the point of all of it was.
Let them apologize and prevaricate.
Let them grow fat and corrupt.
Let them become what they fought against.
Just let them live.
2.
God, let them live on the muddy banks of Reality
And not in the hallowed halls of Memory.
Give them feet of clay to step awkwardly on
And not wings to fly above it all.
To you who would be immortalized:
Don’t you dare become a statue!
Don’t you dare join the pantheon of martyrs!
Valhalla has no room for you.
How could you leave us here alone?
How could you be so selfish?
And to you, the troubadours:
Don’t write songs about them as if they were already dead!
You stalk the living like a vulture.
Go back to your hiding place to compose more dirges.
And to us, the spectators:
Don’t you dare immortalize them!
Don’t you dare let them die!
Don’t pretend that you’re helpless!
Your power shames you.
Don’t let it go to waste.
