By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"The Answer To My Prayer" rejects self-pity by setting the speaker’s battered old age against the daily deaths of the very young.
The page speaks in the voice of someone physically marked by survival who refuses to turn injury into a private tragedy. Its moral scale is public, not personal: one old man’s losses are measured against boys still dying before they reach twenty-one. That contrast gives the poem its hardness and its prayerful force at once.
'The Answer To My Prayer' refuses self-pity through a single rhetorical question: 'Do you think after all I have done / As an old man with one eye and one leg / I should find dismay / Under all the Suns and Moons I've seen.' The answer is supplied by scale rather than statement - 'When still warriors die every day / at ages less than twenty one' - measuring the speaker's battered survival against the deaths of the young, which makes the prayer's answer a hard, public humility.