Without Using Big Words

"Without Using Big Words"

(“He sent me to tell the good news without using big words that would make the cross of Christ lose its power.” 1 Corinthians 17b)

I had accumulated too many marks for my misconduct;
demerits handed out over the course of a lifetime.
Though I wanted to argue, I wanted to complain,
I wanted to say, with the eternal chorus, “It’s not
fair” to the teacher who heavy-handed me my
red-checked marks.

I deserved the blame, had whited when I should have blacked:
I was censurable.
I could find no occasion to mis-explain my absence from
truth when the evidence stared me straight in the eye.

Still I was convinced a small group, faithful only to those
happy about my failure, my fall;
a cabal meeting behind closed doors. I was merely a
rag doll of words made up by a marionette.

I wanted to deny every charge spoken against me,
stomp my feet until they could hear my red-faced anger;
I found no voice, language or philosophy capable of
making it clear, a speech so high and mighty they
would have to look it up in a dictionary:
Grandiloquent, and proof I had studied well.

Haply (it was not joyful), my schemes fell below the bar,
passwords cracked, an alphabet scattered on the floor.
I was undone, guilty, the regretful one;
Compunctious, I crawled blindly to find pity
after my cornered performance of faked inequality.

Mercy and Power richly meet; a committee, a strategy
beyond mind or muscle. All immoral, I stood with
more red-checks than I dreamt possible. And cried
where the linoleum puddles the tears between my dirty feet
and the bloody holes in His.

And I felt, I cannot say when-who, but surely, the
mercy that made me reject every argument about my
innocence;
and accept, happily, the fate that lately made me see
white x’s where the red-checks once made me
wince at imperfection simply stated.

I was gravel and ash, now, with a dream after the waking,
Commencement is now a day launching me loveward,
a new word I cannot construct that combines every utterance
that loaded my guilt, my back breaking, onto the back of the
LoveWard, his heart aching,
taking it, tears and cruel gashes, to Death where He, I and
my red-checks also, died at once.

And still, I do not know how-why, but I know
Who.