A prayer for this crawling earth,

For all who make me think a man a worm,

For all who are at the worst,

Like the suckling mother who makes

The Bombay traffic lights so slow to change

And me the more superfluous the more I wait,

Ignoring her pleading hands

Outside my taxi-window; yet even she is glad

She is not the worst; so a prayer for the limbless man

I fastidiously step around

As I thread the Chowringhee crowds;

Blind Gloucester was the furthest down

For Shakespeare,

Yet he gave him Edgar:

A prayer for all for whom there is even no Mother Teresa,

And for me, too, if in some unimaginable blinded time

There is no wife, no daughter, no God to come

And say, ‘Give me thy arm.’