In Their Own Words
Adam O. Davis on “The Nurse on National Prayer”
The Nurse on National Prayer
It wasn’t about
the bullets
but the burden
those little bodies carried
as they were
carried
like cashier’s checks
to the big bank
manager
in the sky
where with enough
subtraction
the sins those souls claimed
would be pretty
as something wrapped
in paper
& twine.
Isn’t it pretty to think
so?
Isn’t it pretty
to think
we planted a cemetery
in June
and come April
trees grew to shade it?
Somewhere
cool for the children
to play.
From Pyrrhic Symphony (University of Nebraska Press, 2026). Copyright © by Adam O. Davis. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
On “The Nurse on National Prayer”
This poem scared me when it first appeared, back in 2013, in a much larger poem, and, because it scared me, it took nearly ten years for me to understand that it—not the larger piece it was part of—was the poem. It scared me then and it scares me now not only for its subject matter, but for the anger it contains. But why shouldn’t it be angry?
Having taught high school English for the past 17 years, you could say I’ve had drills drilled into me: fire drills, lockdown drills, shelter-in-place drills, earthquake drills, active shooter drills… Some come with evacuation. Some without. For some drills, we’re told to move outside in an orderly fashion. For other drills, we’re told to lower our window shades, block the door with furniture, hide under the table and stay quiet while people try to open our locked doors. This isn’t real but we treat it like it’s real so that we’ll be ready if it ever becomes real. In this, it’s like a game, like hide-and-go-seek, with nearly a thousand people playing along. Those seeking look for those hiding. Those hiding wait for what might happen when they’re found.
During drills, we’re told to imagine that someone is coming to harm us. We’re told to pretend that we’re dead or to improvise a weapon from common classroom materials: staplers, tape dispensers, three-hole punchers. We’re told to imagine how to use our bodies, like furniture, for the protection of others. In these and so many other ways, we’re told to expect death, and in doing so we normalize the expectation of violence in places of learning, that school shootings are inevitabilities to prepare for—not national disasters but natural ones, things not for the reality of policy but the performance of prayer.
This all fed into the writing of “The Nurse of National Prayer”, yet it was the Nurse—a character who is present throughout Pyrrhic Symphony—who enabled it to rise above simple polemic or obvious social commentary. Offering a counterweight to the book’s feverish speaker, the Nurse is unflinchingly honest—acerbic, blunt, yet not without art, she serves as a foil, redeeming the speaker’s humanity as she holds society to account for its avarice and myopia. Ultimately, it is her care—not born out of condescension but love—that shines a light on the absurdity of what we as a country are willing to sacrifice in the name of that most poorly understood word: freedom.
