Arts
This Year, Jesus Has Two Mommies
A Parable of Coming
A PARABLE OF COMING
I have a parable for you.
I’d send it off in handwriting, if I knew where to send it.
Only then would there be purpose,
a grandiose gesture familiar to letters,
trite as the human condition.
If I could put a stamp on an envelope
anticipation might fly away,
where you could open it and save it.
Perhaps to remember it?
But then the wall –
impossible to scale –
every time I try,
I fail.
Electronics are a poor replacement for script with a feminine slant.
[This place] where you can’t feel my paper.
I just say it now!
I am tired of battle, the most obvious flaw in my writing –
the wandering around hills, wondering what to say.
Am I inhuman because I have a safe little world?
[This place]
The Kingdom in light between white cruxes,
(a goddess outlined in white)
she was pink and yellow.
I was red and afraid of
the sturdy men who drove chariots,
turning fast down muddy alleyways and into
gated straight-aways where many people looked on.
A long time ago I could see fine from the doorway,
there are no stones inside a safe little world –
only the hot breath painting circles on windowpanes,
then slowly sucking them away.
Only now do I throw rocks.
I suggest the rails, road, and air.
I deal in memories.
My eyes can’t hold onto the pictures taken of Prague,
in that fish eye,
the world is aflame.
I am looking at a piece of petrified wood
from a barn about eight miles from here.
It leans out off the chipped molding,
casting a shadow against the sun on the windowsill.
Wasting the every day
becomes forgetting the fallen leaf and taste of rain;
then it is as if our lives never happened.
I am not waiting for the son of man,
but I am asking him to come.
Come?
Yes?
Come.
Yes.
H. R. Berkowitz