The Morning Before They Were Led from the Cell of Thieves Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered. –Proverbs 21:13 Beyond the wall of the city where beggars huddle dispossessed and naked, clotted for warmth, a writhing muttering litter of beasts from whom everything has been taken, where every refugee from every cataclysm and every half-drowned escapee from the pillaged forest the rising seas the poisoned fields sleeps and scrapes through piles of leavings, three times over (I tell you, it is true!) that blackened refuse is turned and turned again three times over beyond the wall of the city as pyres for the dead rise, and ditches for the ashes; beyond the still empty crosses those thieves will be led already depleted of anything familiar to the living. It is a silent thing, this watching, this doom. Move along if you cannot believe the nascent spring, all its alleged promise with its little emerging fists of buds, can birth something so cruel turn your back and turn away: He is not here, the one you search for! The cave is empty! Return to the shrinking world! The well fed, their peaceful niches their celebrations of the housed and protected, nursed and nurtured, their shallow disputes and rebukes. This is the new world’s first dawn when jackals skulk from a jumble of nightbones into their garbled disappearances never leaving a clue, and the first buzzards spin under cold cotton glowing and one of ten little ones shudders to silence in an egg carton crib and even the presumed redemption those holy stations of undeserved but granted-through-grace relief turn desperate, a lie, for those who wake in the last of the half-night, light their lanterns and dress for the ceremonies of their gods who have taught that this, all of this, the unseen, the turned from, the refused, is forbidden, unforgiven, in the countries where they huddle over their clutches of hope the little hoards of appropriated love and life. Beyond the walls of the city where petty thieves and grifters are required to tithe their lives for us all in smoky open camps on the other side of war, forgotten denuded valleys cradled without comfort in the subducting faults of the earth where those always left wanting reach to the sky and the sky has nothing not even rain, out there (I tell you, it is true!) beyond your averted gaze your savior is waiting your savior has always been waiting near clumsy paths into the clusters of huts and cardboard shacks. That smell of a last strip of goat or dog or frying mush of millet and dust, the murmur of hunger the stink of everything let go somewhere with no space for letting go. You are welcome yes you are welcome; let us go.
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Little emerging fists…nightbones…Bob! An incredibly moving poem, thank you for writing it, and sharing. ❤️