Low-Voiced Prayer

Low-voiced prayer: words, not my own, about a "galvanized corpse." There is a tale too long to quote here of an Irish wake, where the relatives of the deceased had met to recount his virtues and drink his whisky; and after faint praise had reached the stage of decided blame, the corpse arose and with forcible language and personal violence struck the mourners with an open right hand and clenched left fist. That day the spots become more distinct and more luminous. The nebulosity of death was resolved into thousands of stars, thrown off, as it were, from the central mass moving in two spiral curves. One was for fighting. The other proceeded from an outer nucleus, distinctly seen, and connected to one zone, or space, or ring that would begin to increase gradually at the point of separation. Thus the second night of the wake ended, being the second period in the order of Creation.

Now why doesn't Moses describe all these motions, energies, chemical affinities, diffusions, combinations, and constitutional charges in matter, instead of saying that God made the zone of separation; why? Because he was not theorizing or speculating, but observing as God called forth the galvanized corpse from the firmament to act as his celestial army.

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John Rodzvilla teaches in the Publishing and Writing programs at Emerson College in Boston. He lives on the North Shore of Boston where he's protected by the neighborhood's murder of crows. His work has appeared in Harvard Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Hypnopomp, and other literary magazines.