"Pietà"
You’re on your own now, downtown
baking shortbread for the soup kitchen
crowd. Sts. Peter & Paul hold you up
to God’s light, as they always have,
as you’ve come to expect.
Your vista
is a crack house. Your home’s a tenement
for registered offenders. Forgive me
my dread of your daily bread, a salt lick
wafer in a hunter’s forest. What gives you
peace I will never understand,
this brand
of new testament written in Sharpie
on a linen closet wall. A pauper fantasy
too narrow for legs. What kind of poverty
gives away its family? I see now a Spirit
must have visited me.
When I was born
he must have said: —Unto you this anomaly
is given, unsolvable, with a name so holy
it cannot be discerned.— I don’t decode
anymore. It gives me headaches,
like thorns.
I’ve given up on martyrs with capital M’s.
Give your love to Him who made you
and not to me. Take my blessing and die,
without intervention.
And if at the end
I go unseemly with tears, holding your body
wasted by fasting, listening in vain for your
squandered heart, you should know that I cry
for unbearable joy, to see you at long last
without your cross.
© 2008 Laura Polley
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