We Send Prophecies

We Send Prophecies

("Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” Matthew 12:30)

We make up names we found on scraps scattered on the ground,
torn edges of old poetry at an old author’s feet.
We rewrite the majesty, we make it fit for the streets,
but by the time we get there the houses are apartments,
the playmates have retired, and the grade-school hallways are
oh so much smaller than they were when we began.

We formulate the ways to eternity, we bake pies without recipes
and all along we sing the songs we heard from Mawmaw’s kitchen,
and wish she was still here to sing them.

We master-mind life’s navigation, steering past the last field
still cracking with marigolds and golden poppies. Next week
they break ground on the next Jacuzzi factory, mowing the
fair-haired garden down.

We send prophecies in the mail, we memorize the fictional apocalypse
seen through the latest novelist’s insistent of inerrancy. We study
multi-million dollar platforms and borrow a few thousand for
our daydreams. We turn a blind eye, (with misty recitations
explaining the third eye to a world lately myopic), we turn
the blinded eye toward the borders where refugees camp

And use the other eye to measure the miles per gallon
on the Winnebago we will ride cross country, freer than
the sky.

We make up names, we toss out the claims that Jesus could be
the Perfect Son and mean His sayings. We make him up; an angel,
an uncle, a poet, a hippie, a renegade, a god, a villain,
a vigilante, a brother, the other side of Cohen or Dylan,

But to bow in trembling unknowing is beyond our graphite ways.
We insist upon 8 and a half by 11, or we will not believe the dimensions
of Might and Compassion that cannot be worded except in the beginning
and incarnate among flesh and blood.