Fourth Prayer

Ebba Lindqvist

translated by Janice D. Soderling

Give us today our daily bread.

You ask what we mean?

Well, by daily bread we mean ordinary bread

ordinary old-fashioned bread

that doesn’t contain too much

                        strontium 90

and give us not too high a dose of

                       radioiodine 131

in our

                          breast milk

so our infants won’t be

                            damaged

already before their first birthday.

Can you please make that your will?

We ask in this prayer that you allow those heavy clouds charged with nuclear radiation to drift up to the Arctic regions

without damaging any living thing, not the grass, not the herbs,— and relieve us of our charge over the fowl of the air and the fish of the sea.

Deliver us from our dominion over the earth. We seem to have totally lost control.

And that’s a fact.