Take neither cloak nor staff
It takes a manner of a sweetness
laboring each day to build a faith
forsaking complex structures,
knowing there's a paradise afoot
...a stubborn joy that clings like sand
to those retreating from the beach.
That serendipitous refreshment from fatigue
comes when forgotten love speaks out
behind the shining other world out there
that looms in some tendentious ecstasy.
It takes a bible, doesn't it?
A yellowed, well-thumbed document
to hold beneath the spotlight—
add a mellow-voiced evangelist
who holds beneath contempt
an anti-perspirant
or yet a scholar's honest sweat;
it takes a book upheld
from mesmery.
A bit of holy trickery is all it takes.
Saints turned out like sausages,
with sandals worn so thin
that they must shake the dust
from off itinerant feet,
ooze forth salvation as they can, yet
praise the Lord, the blessings
flow more sluggishly this year,
the price of widows' mites
more dear.
And was it Satan who lived on
to fall another day?
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