Jesus, Thomas Paine, and John Woolman

.. ..

Looking to his feet for words, he
prepared, listening

to breath, waiting for it to
swell into syllables of the hardest teaching.

 Avant-garde melodies fall on deaf ears.

 Nevertheless, genius desire forms on the
tongue,

perches, and preens to fly. Looking
up

then, he saw the distant
shimmering and began:

Love your enemies, do good to
them which hate you, Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully
use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other…

.. ..

From high on Golgotha, the
distant towers, parks, and spilling fields

 
he had seen from the Mount as he spoke his Sermon

 to the restless, scratching, coughing,
pissing, crowd

were just visible.

.. ..

Those were times

 that tried men’s souls.

 As if there were any other sorts.

Thomas Paine’s passionate patriotic
propagandist plea to pay

Tyranny with blood

was a siren song.

And He would not have sung along.

.. ..

.. ..

.. ..

John Woolman, a Quaker in Paine’s
time, heard

 that sounding brass and cymbal, but was not
moved to leap

 into the honey. He sat, in the heat, as
Quakers do,

 among his kind, and listened to the cicada and
the blowing,

 harnessed horses. Backs held straight in their
stodgy suits and broad

 brimmed hats, their wives in long dresses and
laced bonnets, all

 sweating in the sweltering humid noon in the
shade of a stifling barn--

 a mockingbird condescended augustly through
the open hay door and posed

 above them on a cross-beam like a wild-eyed
preacher.

He preened his wings as if to fly,
then with imperious gaze, admonished all

 and defied their silence with his ingenious
song, his implacable desire.

.. ..