Skip to main content

The Homeless Saint



(Portrait from Lazarus Speaks)

All of the cities are ablaze with celebration. The ragged and homeless Saint Labre nods as I, the inflexible spectator, look sideways to avoid his tattered gaze of expectation.

The streets of the world still come alive at sundown, laugh and laugh and circle round and round without a care or vital thought piercing the ragged spirit. The tables are set, no time for regret. The lawns are cut, no time for rain. The streets are full, no time for silence. The children are dead, no time for pain.

Parents of this racket wail their consent with their indifference to murderous war. I've the blood of children on my hands and must put an end to murder evermore or the ground will certainly swallow me up and the sky will collapse upon the reception. Prospering from murder, greed and deception will relinquish my solemn vow with creation.

I declare to you that these things I do not know. I’m not supposed to know. I’m meant to believe. If I knew, faith would cease to have meaning and creation wouldn’t be a god and pony show! This day and age is not mine to devour, not mine to consume. The banquet of horrid lies assembled before me is heaped with greed, with the murder found in equally horrid and complicit eyes.


© 2011 by mark prime

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

sdrawkcaB nruT (Turn Backwards)

I have been witness to the four pillars and see no reason to carry death there. Doesn’t the world know that life moves for more than just the sons of Abraham? O! I see the stunned throats floating by in the dusk to their stiff-limbed sleep as metal rains down over the Jordan’s western prophet, children dying there. I am here, waiting, breathing in the dusk under the shadow of the patriarch, asking, can we again build the shrine inside the soul and leave our flesh to time? © 2008 mrp/thepoetryman
32 comments
read the poem
........•SHRIEKING MACHINE•........                  •HEAD-LINES•                           •RIP•     ---(“Russian missiles blast Ukrainian military academy and hospital, killing more than 50, officials say”)---    There are no more lessons to learn here, no more beds to hold the human wounded, just missile’s shrieking their grotesque ode, The Death of Humankind! RIP, children of God…    ---(“Hundreds attend Mercer Island vigil, march for murdered Israeli hostages”)---    Dear mourners, this is the brutal vacuum of a genocidal, terror-filled, indiscriminate war-machine made of fear and we are all hostages to its deafening roar! RIP, children of God…    ---(“10-year-old allegedly confesses to fatally shooting 82-year-old man and his daughter”)---    I must confess, this is part of war’s shrieking, children lost with a we...
Post a Comment
read the poem

Waiting for It

Why do they stay there, between war and peace? Sky’s tapestry doles out guns, bombs and rocks while flesh and bone swim away from the ache yet live on as the food for the murder of peace. Why do we hide from the truth as if it were an ogre while death makes a home inside their living and war dispatches a raven to their door, smirking with the teeth of empire? Why do we wait, stooped for another wink? The sky’s drapery has tossed down ample clues, peace is breathing in harmony with war. (Road-maps are useless to blind leaders.) Why do they hold there, hunched in the gloom? Hatred’s bird cackling with bereavement needs end. Are we not rightly dishonored when we fill its trough with blood? © 2007 mrp/thepoetryman
12 comments
read the poem