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Seventh Prayer of My Body

Your entreatful menace, your tender cunning,
your sweet deceits—all these I know.
Does this dance today weigh so heavy upon me
that even I, till I ache, bare myself to you?

You know that there are no tracks in this place,
no predator is here, no wild beast passes by.
Be merciful, be generous and gentle with this body,
which in its waiting is wasting away.

This body is like a parched riverbed
cracked from the heat and blackened by sun.
This body is tenacious, hungry as a barren field.
Be its new mother, reconceive it now.

Aco Šopov, Not-Being, 1963
Read the cycle “Prayers of My Body”
Translated by Rawley Grau and Christina E. Kramer, The Long Coming of the Fire, Deep Vellum, 2023