It doesn’t take a prophet
To see the future tonight.
The sleep is written clearly
On their eyelids
And their eyes:
Eyes which I only see
In glimpses
As the eyelids flutter
Open. 

Simon and Thaddeus,
James and Bartholomew,
Matthew and Thomas,
Philip and Andrew:
Wait here, awake,
Stay here and pray.
I’ll take these three,
Step over this way,
Stop there and pray.

It doesn’t take a prophet
To know that all eight of them
Will fall asleep.

But James Boanerges,
And John Son of Thunder:
The fire in your souls
Will stifle your yawns,
Will it not?
And Simon, my Rock,
Impulsive, outspoken,
(Too rarely thinking),
Of your fellows unique
For raising objections
When I chart a future
Of failure and death.

But it doesn’t take a prophet
To know they’ll lay their heads down
And even their snores won’t wake them.

Judas, now: he’ll stay awake.

It doesn’t take a prophet
To know where he is,
What he’s doing.

I could read his face at dinner.
He thought he wore a mask,
But the mask betrayed him
Just as surely as he goes
To betray me.

It doesn’t take a prophet
To know what’s coming,
What will happen
To me. 

If they but paid attention, Oh!
They’d stay awake –
Indeed, they’d run.
They will run in an hour.
Peter puts his faith
In his staunch courage
And so say they all,
But just as sleep denies me
The comfort of his prayer tonight
His fear will rise to deny me
Tomorrow.
And so will they all.

It doesn’t take a prophet
To know what’s coming,
What will happen
With them.

It doesn’t take a prophet
To know what’s coming,
What will happen
To me.

Does it take a prophet
To wait here, all alone
Amidst the slumbering
Nascent betrayers,
For the kiss of death?
Some ignorance
Might have been kinder.
There will be others down the years
Who’ll wait for death
And torture’s visitation:
Ten of these, in fact.

It doesn’t take a prophet
To know what’s coming,
Or
To endure what’s coming.

It takes a prophet to take comfort
In what lies beyond what’s coming,
To see the strength and courage
Of these sleeping men,
To hope for victory beyond defeat,
To see new life upon the farther shore
Of death.

The people love him, and he’s bested us
At every argument (because he did?),
So we can see the trembling applecart
Which threatens to spill blood, not fruit, to drain
Into the Kidron Brook. He’s made us look
Like fools – the mocking laughter echoes still.
Where learning fails, then money may suffice
To rid us of this meddling carpenter.
We need a time and place to seize him, out
Of sight of crowds which might take arms and launch
The war which will destroy not only them
But us, the city, and the nation. Make
This one obscure and soon forgotten man
The sacrifice who saves the world we know.
So open up the treasury, and see
What we might offer one of his close friends
To tell us when, and where, and who he is
(Those guards pay no attention; they won’t know).
Six stacks of silver, thirty coins in all:
Yes, this may do; yes, this may serve to coax
Betrayal from a disappointed friend.

Those last two coins? The small ones? Put them back.
They only speak of humble poverty.
We deal with sacrifices and with grand
Designs; it is not fit that we should so
Betray our desperation by a pair
Of copper mites – nor does a Nazarene,
No matter how he troubles us, command
A bounty made of gold. This price will serve.
We hardly dare to hope that we will find
Our agent soon, but search we must. Let’s pray
We have our opportunity, and seize
Our carpenter, before the festival
Gets fully under way. Tomorrow night
Is much too soon to hope for and almost
Too late to make our sacrifice to Rome
Before its wrath erupts in fire and blood.

A quiet trial on this Thursday would
Ensure a Friday we will count as good.
 

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.