Watching the Dinghy

Watching the Dinghy

(“The philosophers said these things because Paul was telling the Good News about Jesus and saying that people would come back to life.” Acts 17:18b)

They gathered in thinly drawn lines along the
banks of the sea,
watching the dinghy. The prophets had predicted
its demise. Now all that was left was
to watch it capsize.

The clouds grasped its hull with gray fingers,
the winds mocked its path through the rocky waves,
as if to say,
“We already know how this will end.”

It was December and ice pierced the surface tension
like scorpion darts, like a fire so cold it froze everything
in place.

Bundled in overcoats from London Fog, the dragon-speakers
paced the beach, telling tales of death so dark that no one
could remember how
the summer ever began. They stuck hope through the heart with
unholy fear and called it the will of the universe.

Everyone checked their calendars, they circled the day and the hour,
everyone knew the gods do not meander. They expected the faltering,
the great apostasy, the permanent ink on hands and foreheads,
the devil stinging sinners. The Anti-All was there to
draw the dinghy deeper than Hades’ pit. The people clapped
when they heard:
Armageddon.

Across the lake, above the shore, behind the clouds, underneath the
uproar,
a single flare flew from the dinghy towards the dawn. A few looked up,
but most brushed the sand from off their feet. It was time for
the earth to split;
the elect forever, and the damned severed.

Ah, but why,
a few surmised,
would the little boat be saved
only to boil the waters and burn the waves
until destruction was all anyone remembered from that day.

Some still look up, see the sky, see the redemption, hear the cry that
announces
the way that all things
become new
once the rising sun burns the fog
and opens the mirror lake like
a tomb finally emptied. Like a world
finally free.