I Pray for our Roof
I pray for our roof. It is battered and torn.
rust- and wind-worn, it endured years
of Christmases and fiestas and Labor Days.
Our roof exhibits both sharpness and bluntness
uncommon in your usual middle-class home.
I pray for our roof. I remember the unnecessary clanging
that kept me awake in the ungodly hours of night.
It haunts me to this day, however
unnecessary, there are noise - not unlike music -
that lingers in one’s head
long after they fade, long after
they should not matter any more, long after
they become irrelevant.
I pray for our roof, and I forgive him
for failing to comfort me when
I needed to be comforted most;
when I had no one else to turn to.
My mother used to joke about
how time can never destroy our home
because the shouting, the alcohol,
the abuse and the nightly entropy
would beat time to it.
In retrospect, creaking roofs
and crumbling walls
are nothing to joke about.
I pray for our roof. I see him tired, persevering
through years of fire; perhaps it is a sin
to be old and battered and torn and to not have
the means to provide for your own, and end up
frustrated, that one points fingers
at the unforgiving people, the north wind, or God.
Still, I pray for our roof every day —
through the years he seemed to mellow.
I rise. I dress. I proceed weakly to the window.*
I pray for our roof,
though the rain remains.
—
*This line is borrowed from Virginia Woolf’s letter/essay “Middlebrow”
