| Psalm
10
Of Jesus carrying a child.
You
look out your window.
The
wind carries a knife in its back pocket.
Jesus enters an olive grove carrying a corpse, looking at
you.
The corpse is a bombed child, yours.
Jesus
has wide eyes and shoulders, thin enough to be painted on
a plate.
The child is blue, like the sea, like the sleeve of your shirt.
Jesus walked in a raw, hollow snow, only a wave, a ghost,
wind
across a white pond, toward you. He walked like a winter landscape.
You are going to church in the snow sky. The child’s
chest cavity lies open,
a pool of black blood. She weighs a thousand pounds;
only
Jesus can hold her now.
"Do not fear," he says, "she is asleep."
You understand she is the one who is many.
You
alone can pull her back from the many, to the one.
You must make her older, because she rushed too soon to her
last category.
This is the gift of Jesus, to hold her for you.
The
music of his voice is like an underwater shadow.
To get to him, you must dive deep,
past the ancient tessellated floor where candles burn in
the ornate chancel
for
the living and the dead, down to a nameless corpse.
This is migration to the land of your blood.
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