For all the teachers and staff who have to tout party lines and wear masks and avoid intimacy...
For all the tiny girls whose parents dissappear on an evening leaving them out in the cold and dark until after ten at night when in desperation they come banging on the only door that will open to them, a foreigners...
For all the nuns who can't leave...
For all the beggar children who go about disheveled and thin, discarded by the world, with piercingly honest requests for only bread and a place to wash their filth scarred hands...
For all the students with drunken, abusive parents and horror stories hidden behind shy smiles...
For all the aging janitors who have a tendency to lean from exhaustion into those who dare to stop and chat with them...
For all of the students who ache with a desire to be known and safe that they cannot name but is plainly revealed in their furtive glances and cryptic remarks about loneliness and fatigue...
For all the vegetable sellers with swollen, pussy hands and permanently twisted fingernails that visibly tingle with pain...
For all of the monks who can't explain...
For all of the young women with explosive husbands who refuse to give them even a second thought as they rage about divorce and leave them to shed violently silent tears during a break between classes...
For all the victims of change...
For all the prisoners of idols...
For all the slaves of fear...
I offer you, Holy of Holies, this modest plea... come save.
Even now my witness is in heaven, my advocate is on high. My intercessor is my friend as I pour out my tears to the Holy One.
