Faith Healing

Slowly the women file to where he stands / Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair, / Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly / Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands, / Within whose warm spring rain of loving care / Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child, / What’s wrong, the deep American voice demands, / And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer / Directing God about this eye, that knee. / Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled // Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some / Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives / Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud / With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb / And idiot child within them still survives / To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice / At last calls them alone, that hands have come / To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives / Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd / Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice — // What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake: / By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps / A sense of life lived according to love. / To some it means the difference they could make / By loving others, but across most it sweeps / As all they might have done had they been loved. / That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache, / As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps, / Spreads slowly through them — that, and the voice above / Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.