More on: sanctuary

In the sanctuary, I repeated a childhood prayer 
I knew some of the words to. I’d skip  
a lecture and want to skip them all— 

when I was young, his voice a low path through nightmare,
reading so that I wouldn’t dream of dying . . .

In a room at the side of the hand-painted santuario, with its seven-foot cross found glowing one day in the red desert dust, a row of crutches left behind, and walls of photos of the children for whom we pray. Their baby shoes. Their army uniforms. Ourselves in them. Ordinary pains, unending in time as…