TONIGHT, I HOPE ALL MY ENEMIES ARE FALLING IN LOVE

by Matthew Olzmann

Lord, let them know the kind of love that unhinges
the brain, blesses the air with the exuberant
stupidity of mourning doves, casts spells
over the land until bewildered squadrons
of raw bunnies explode from the damp earth in spring.
Let them know, Lord, the kind of love
that will inhabit them, call on them, while hunkered
in their midnight bunkers, to abandon
their revenge schematics and damage diagrams
as they begin, without noticing, to hum
some half-remembered tune until their henchmen
have to shake them, shouting, Are you humming
a Tori Amos song? We’re trying to plot a war over here.
Once, I was angry, a young man full of winter,
downed power cables, highways whose concrete
cracked in the electric cold. And what was it
that brought the color back to the branches,
returned feeling to my frostbitten fingers
and found me redeemed inside the rubble of my life?
Let them find that, Lord. They might be
embarrassed by it, Lord, but the discomforts
and humiliations that bloom
in the territories where men discover
emotional structures buried in the gut are not
the aim of this prayer. Joy is. Let them, Lord, find it.

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design. He teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.