An applecart looks stable.
Two posts descend
From its side poles
To rest upon the ground
In balance with the running wheels
Beneath the load.
But it’s a fragile
Frail solidity.
Too great a weight
Upon the bed behind the wheels –
“Do not sit there, sir!” –
And we’ve upset the applecart.
The joint where posts
And side poles meet
Is hard to reinforce.
Too great a force,
Particularly at an angle,
And the fasteners will fail,
The poles will fall,
The apples topple to the ground
And roll in avalanche
Accelerating down the slope
To spill pedestrians below.

The city Jesus entered was an applecart,
Its frail stability
Obscure to many,
Painfully apparent to the ones
Who had their hands
Upon its pulling rails.
Apples plunging down its
Steep and stony slopes
Would fell the people
And the promise
Of a nation. 

The stakes are high.
The situation perilous.
In times like these,
One must do what one must
To keep those apples balanced,
Keep the fragile posts of peace
From breaking.

Do what one must.
What one must.
One must.

Anything one must.

The end: It justifies the means.

Doesn’t it?

And thus are innocents betrayed.
And thus are innocents condemned. 

God in her wisdom made the snow
And now he will not make it go.

(With apologies to Ogden Nash)

More snow?

No!!!!!!!

Yesterday the city got
An earfull and an eyefull:
The sudden improvised parade
(That some would call a mob)
Was followed by a scene
Of shouted threats and violence
(Did those plaited cords he wove
Into a whip find skin
While driving money changers
From the Temple?). 
Like a boulder trembling on a hillside,
Or rather like a city occupied
By a callous foreign power
Rebellion hovered in the air.
Collaborators – those who benefit
From embracing foreign overlords –
Must have trembled,
Hands tensed and then relaxed,
But never quite released
From hafts of spears,
From hilts of swords.

Today the city gets to catch its breath.
The voices raised are in debate,
The arguments of scholars in the Temple.
The Galilean teacher’s fame
Has overcome his humble origins.
They would have happily ignored him,
Now he stands and, damn the man,
Confounds them point by point.
Just when it seems they have him trapped
(Let’s force him to a fatal choice
Between rebellion against Rome
And blasphemy against our God)
He slips away and turns the rhetoric
Upon his adversaries. 

Beyond these sacred courts
The tension shivers in the city.
The festival has filled the streets
The Roman Governor is resident,
The client King is in his palace, too.

At times like these,
Is there anything
More frightful
Than
A prophet? 

“Hosannah!” cried the people,
As the prophet/healer climbed the streets.
“Save us!” cried the people
To the donkey-mounted teacher.

“Save us!” would become a mockery
In just five days
When “You saved others, save yourself!”
Officials who conspired
At judicial murder
Threw into the face
Of this same
Tortured
Dying
Man.

“Hosannah!” “Save us!”
Not, as modern English ears
Would hear it,
“Hallelujah!” “Praise to God!”

Jesus did not hear
The praises of the little children.
Jesus heard
The desperation of their parents.

Save the desperate, God,
From their oppression and despair.
Save the desperate, God,
From our complacency and ignorance.

Save the desperate, God,
From our talent
For self-serving re-translation
That turns the cry for aid
Into a shout of joy. 

 

Outside my window: No! The Flakes of Hell!
(Yes, I’ve read Dante, so I know that Hell
Is cold.) The pride of my New England birth
And heritage is humbled. Leave my big
Kid snow boots by the door and look for me
Beneath the bedclothes. That’s where I will be.

All right, it’s really nothing. So few flakes
The camera on my tablet captures none
Of the descending argent, so few flakes
They hardly rate the designation, “dust.”
So far, so good, and hardly worth the woe
Which rises in me at the sight of snow. 

I’d like to blame you, God, or at the least,
Infer a parable to guide my life
From these soft frozen crystals, but I know
That it’s not all about me. Weather comes,
And as a human who contributes to
A change in climate, I contribute, too.

No lesson, then, nor radical despair,
Unless I seize some comfort in the thought
That I can cope. This straw will not destroy
This camel’s back, nor will this snow, for God,
My God, the One who strewed this stuff around
Is also Who can clear it from the ground. 

I can imagine
Barely
The terror of the pilot
Locked outside the cockpit
As the plane descends. 

I can imagine
The pain and deep despair
Which makes
A person wonder
If their life should end.

I cannot imagine
The torment of the soul
Of anyone who takes
So many other lives
To end with theirs.

For this I’m grateful, Lord.
Amen. 

They stand upon a row of guitar cases
(These four guitarists of the apocalypse?):
A bright pink bunny
A penguin with a red bow tie
A scarlet orange bird I like to call a phoenix, and
A teddy bear whose joints are mostly mending and
Whose scanty artificial fur is mostly worn away.
My merry melancholy troop of memories.

The oldest is the bear (of course)
Whose presence comforted my nights
From nigh my birth.
My mother’s fingers held the needle
Seeking stronger cloth beyond the rips and ravels,
And left the thread that holds this bear together.
A little boy is rough on bears!
Each shiny patch where fake fur wore away
Declares a multitude of fierce embraces
Tumbles down a hill
Mad dashes clutched in sticky hands
Relieved retrievals from that spot beneath a tree
Where this forgetful, careless boy had left him
To dissolve in tears until a kind exasperated parent
Recovered him again.

The bright pink bunny was not mine to start.
He rested on the pillow of my mother
As she endured the last months of her life.
Recurring cancer struck and laid her low,
Restricted her ability to speak
And made her final bed one in a hospital.
The bunny joined a host of other gifts
Designed to comfort one whom many loved.
And when she died, the bunny went with me
In a green Plymouth Valiant
Back to school
Despite a lingering sexist part of me
(It lingers still, I know)
That isn’t fond of pink.

I won the scarlet bird at a game of chance or skill –
It’s hard to tell those games apart upon the midway of a fair.
As I recall, I offered him to someone that I loved
(It might have been another prize, some other time),
And she said, “No.”
Not so long after, she said, “No,” to me.

Standing tallest: Opus, figure from a comic
Popular when I attended college
(Strange the power those brief years
Hold now so many decades hence).
It is an early Opus (Opus one?);
I can tell because his beak grew markedly
While the comic lasted.
I found a kindred spirit in this penguin
Who combined a wonder at the world
With certain squeamish reflexes
And funny guilty pleasures:
“Actually, I enjoy this is the same awful way
That I enjoy the ‘A-Team.'”
I always pitied the Pinocchio direction
Taken by the artist. This nose looks best to me.

They stand upon a row of guitar cases
(These four guitarists of the apocalypse?):
A bright pink bunny
A penguin with a red bow tie
A scarlet orange bird I like to call a phoenix, and
A teddy bear whose joints are mostly mending and
Whose scanty artificial fur is mostly worn away.
My merry melancholy troop of memories.

When Jesus said,
“Love your neighbor as yourself,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“Do not be angry with your brother or sister,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“Let your word be ‘Yes, yes,’ or ‘No, no,'”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“Love your enemies,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“Beware of practicing your piety before others,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“Do not build up treasures on earth,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“Woe to you who are rich now,”
He meant it. 

When Jesus said,
“You cannot serve God and wealth,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“Do not judge,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“Give all you have to the poor, and follow me,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“It is what comes out of the mouth that defiles,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“Forgive not seven times, but seventy-seven times,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“Let the little children come to me,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“It will be hard for a wealthy person to enter the realm of God,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“All things are possible with God,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“Put your sword back in its place,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“God, forgive them, for they know not what they do,”
He meant it.

When Jesus said,
“It is finished,”
He meant it.
For the moment. 

When Jesus said,
“I am with you always,”
He meant it.
Unto the end of the age. 

A poetic venture into the Gospel of Matthew – with a guest appearance by the Gospel of Luke.

Envy, as a sin,
Didn’t make it to the Big Ten –
Though it did make the Big Seven.
It took some time.
In the Big Ten
It feeds, I guess, the sin
Of coveting.

I rarely sense it, but
It’s hard to tell
If it’s so rarely resident
Within my soul,
Or if it’s so ensconced in me
That I can’t separate it
From the background noise
Of my existence
Until it’s fed by circumstance
Or magnified by need.

Still, on a busy Monday, I confess,
As I admire the violet blossoms
Of the crocus rising from the soil,
I envy it.

Not for its beauty, though I might,
For surely Solomon in all his glory
Lacked its glorious array!

No, it’s the profusion
Of the day: the calls, the mail,
The words, the code,
The questions answered
And the questions still unanswered,
Turn and turn and turn about.

Amidst all this,
I tender my confession:
I envy you, sweet crocus,
That all you need to do today
Is grow.