April 1992
something
was wrong
when buses
didn’t come
streets
were no longer
streets
how easy
hands
became
weapons
blows
gunfire
rupturing
the night
we run
the more
we burn
o god
show us
the way
lead us
spare us
from ever
turning into
walking
matches
amidst
so much
gasoline
Prayers erupt in moments of raw terror or fury—first comes the visceral reaction to danger or horror, and then, often before much thought intervenes, a prayer rises deep in the belly to drown the waking beast of fear. Francisco Alarcón, Mexican-American poet, educator, and, during his formative years, migrant farm worker, knew both fear and fury. His “L.A. Prayer,” written in the wake of the “Rodney King riots” that erupted after a widely publicized incident of police brutality, traces the course of this kind of prayer in one- and two-word lines—bursts that might be spoken on the run. Not until the sixth breathless stanza is God invoked. The first five record an escalating awareness of danger—traffic flow paralyzed, streets transformed into battle zones and neighbors into armed adversaries. As all efforts to escape violence seem only to fuel it, the speaker finally utters cries familiar to every desperate human who has seen the depths: show us . . . lead us . . . spare us.
But then the final seven lines turn a prayer of abject need into something larger: the speaker prays not just that he and those he cares about be spared injury, dispossession, or death, not simply for a way out of the riots—a back road to safety—but for the largeness of spirit that might enable him to resist the lure of violence and the temptation to retaliate. He prays that he and others might not add fuel to the fires of hatred. In the midst of justifiable rage over what the Rodney King beatings, like other abuses of power, revealed about a system of privilege riddled with injustice, his prayer is not to make it worse.
Anna Deavere Smith’s memorable one-woman stage play, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, depicts the responses of forty real-life eyewitnesses to the same riots. Having interviewed each of them extensively about their experiences of the riots, she plays each of them, male and female, young and old—a Korean grocer, a nameless juror in the King trial, the chief of police, a truck driver, and a congresswoman. Later filmed by PBS, the play has continued to generate necessary conversation about the deep roots of racism in L.A. and other American cities. It shows how people of every class and ethnicity live with the consequences of gang warfare, abuses of power, protection of privilege, exploitation of immigrants, and cycles of fear and hatred that play out on the streets. In the midst of it all, there are voices of compassion, wisdom, and understanding, all of them representing the survival of desire for reconciliation that runs even deeper than the currents of hate. Deavere Smith comments on her own work, which included long and difficult conversations about core conflicts: “Theater and film can participate in civic discourse and even influence national attitudes by using the power of entertainment, spectacle, and dialogue. At a time when our national conversation about race has become, to some extent, merely fragments of monologues, Twilight: Los Angeles seeks to create a conversation from these fragments.”*
As urban violence has continued to erupt and a litany of names has been added to the long list of those who have suffered and died from police brutality or urban warfare, other artists have held up lenses and mirrors to help us see what’s happening among us, and to invite us to respond. Alarcón’s poem invites us to pray and shows us how. Prayer begins in noticing. The first stanza replicates stages of awakening to ambient danger, starting with simply “something.” The word by itself is like a lift of the head, a sniff of the air, an intuitive response to a disturbance in the field. The second line drops the other shoe: “was wrong.” Something was wrong. The speaker didn’t know what yet, but recalls the feeling of unease. And what was it? The buses. Where were the buses? They didn’t come.
Then the lens widens. To miss the buses is to notice whole streets filled with a swelling mob of angry people. “No longer streets” deftly identifies that liminal pause between not knowing and knowing—noticing, but not yet recognizing what’s actually happening, because it doesn’t register all at once. Then the particulars: the hands that have become “weapons.” When I read these lines, I think of how medical students have said that in their first experience of working on cadavers, the hardest part can be the hands. Hands that have done so many human things cannot simply be reduced to objects of study. Here, the hands-become-weapons signify a tragic transformation of people into bodies, commodities, cheap labor, threats.
The blows and gunfire “rupturing the night” remind us of the speaker’s still-shocked point of view. In the original Latin, “rupture” was essentially a medical word that referred to the fracturing of limbs or other body parts, like ruptured hernias. That bit of etymological background adds a dimension to this line: what the speaker is witnessing isn’t just civil disturbance or nighttime noise, but human brokenness.
Then a moment of reflection comes—a step back from the fray to recognize a larger truth: “the more / we run / the more / we burn.” It’s hard not to remember, as one reads those words, horrifying images of burning bodies running from houses or a child in flames on a road in Viet Nam. The flight instinct fails to serve survival. Running fans the flames.
Then comes the prayer. “O God” is a phrase so trivialized now in common speech that it comes as a slight surprise when we hear it echoing from the cliff edge of real desperation. It is both plea and demand: “Hear me!” “Where are you?” “O God, come to my aid.” That it is a prayer for the whole community again widens the speaker’s and the reader’s consciousness to a perspective from which it becomes clear that we are all implicated and complicit. We all need to be shown the way, led through the dark night. And we all need what finally the poet prays for—to be spared a fate worse than physical harm. We need not to become the perpetrators, not to be turned into agents of hatred. We need to be people who can navigate all that volatility without inciting the hatred we fear.
The more I read this poem, the more I recognize how powerfully it reminds me what it costs to be a “peacemaker.” I imagine walking through minefields, wading through spilled oil or gasoline, knowing how little it would take to set off a holocaust, daring to be there and not set off one spark. A mentor of mine once advised me on a strategy for dealing with someone else’s fury: “Just try standing there, being a quiet presence, knowing who you are and what you’re about. Don’t react out of your own anxiety.” To pray for peace is to pray for the courage to show up and bring peace to where there is no peace—to streets that are “no longer streets” where fists are raised and windows are shattered. It’s not an invitation to take lightly. It is, when we find ourselves standing in those streets, a calling.
*. See https://www.gvsu.edu/theatre/twilight-los-angeles-1992-162.htm.