The following poems were originally published in the Mercy Issue of The Mockingbird magazine.
A Sinner’s Prayer
Master of patience, forever
abiding our tedious presumptions,
do more, I beg You, than forgive
these sidelong glances as I pray,
sizing up the many I deem less
deserving of your attention.
Bind instead my hands, my heart,
and lead me, tethered, from the plinth
of respectability I’ve raised
in the eyes of these decent people
who know me by name.
Drag me to the rear of this church
in which we pray for the poor
and trust You’ll follow through
without our help, back
to where that strange man stands
unshaven, a greasy sweater
bulging through the torn seams
of his overcoat, frantic eyes
betraying a mind mired
in toxins and regret.
He will, I know, smell of alcohol,
sweat, and urine, but even
from this distance, I see his lips
sound words I’ve yet to learn
as his troubling presence schools
those who, like me, mistake
good manners for a moral life,
how silently, how long You wait
in the upright heart for its turning.
A Rich Young Man
(Mark 10:17-31)
From this vantage, which for lack
of a better word, I’ll call a height,
I nearly apprehend what then
I could not hope to grasp:
the intersecting ironies as,
in willful self-defeat, I turned,
unable to abide the relentless
interrogation of his eyes,
their centers dark as fire-blackened
crucibles, yet radiant with heat
that I mistook for censure.
Recoiling in shame, I fled,
scourging myself through long years
of regret until, nearing an end,
and by sudden circumstance unshackled
from wealth’s burdensome yoke,
I understood at last that he loved me,
his harrowing gaze having fixed my face
in his memory more certainly
than his in mine. So,
at our late reunion, the one I called
“Good Rabbi” called me instead by name
and chronicled the course of my
deferred renunciation:
how, even as I swerved to evade
the needle’s eye, the graceless arc
of my turning refused to stop
where my heart’s despair imagined,
for in that fraught immensity we come
to know as mercy — a sphere without
circumference — every turn we take
may prove a turning toward.
Mary Magdalene
Yes, I mistook him for the gardener,
distraught as I was at his absence, yet
when, I now wonder, was he ever not
nurturing me, crouching like one who tends
budding vines in early spring, patiently
cultivating the hard, reluctant soil?
As a ewe to her shepherd, he drew me
with a voice so familiar that simply
by sounding my name he revealed himself —
so visibly changed — as the beloved
I’d watched disgraced, defiled, and hastily
discarded in a now vacant stone tomb.
Sensing my confusion, my burning need
just then to seize and never surrender
him who’d been so cruelly taken from us,
he cautioned me against such crude clinging
while urgent business awaited us both —
he to his father, I to my brothers.
And so he commissioned me messenger
to those fearful, inconstant followers
who had yet to see what I now witnessed:
the wakened eyes of one who’d suffered death,
the wounded brow lit with unmasked glory,
the graceful movement of his mangled hands.
Even now, awaiting death’s weakened grip,
I feel that fraught encounter in my bones:
how I lingered, still searching, as my friends
came, looked, and left, not yet apprehending
how near he stood, abiding even then
more closely than my grasping hands could hope.
My Accuser
A thoughtless word when I was twelve,
my no to a son who wanted only
to be held, public embarrassments
long forgotten by everyone but me:
these rise like bubbles in the river
of my mind’s monologue, unbidden
indictments in the self’s stale ritual
of accusation and insult.
I’ve long known that voice was neither God’s
nor my father’s — both forgiving me
before I realized what I’d done —
but the merciless bullying of a boy
with an overlong memory,
inhuman standards, and a dread
of humiliations unseen by others
though they still sting my eyes like smoke.
Freedom’s found in unmeasured time,
restless minds yielding to wordless presence —
new boards finely joined, the tending
of tidy gardens, a well-made meal — gifts
found simply in the doing of the thing,
grateful for beauty I neither merited
nor made, yet granted nonetheless,
though I never stopped to ask.
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One response to “A Sinner’s Prayer”
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Thank you for being vulnerable in these words.