The Paralytic’s Friends
(Luke 5: 17-27)
It was murderous hot
And they must have had it about up to here
With hauling this guy around
On a mat.
But you know they loved him too,
They must have been friends from back in the day.
One of the five—it is always this way,
In your age or ours—has had all the bad luck.
Divorce, debt, and a stupid streak
That overcomes his better lights,
And now he’s just decided
Not to get up.
You might almost think it’s another joke—
He was always the clown—
Except that he’s gone quiet too, all shut down and sad.
The four friends want him back on his feet,
They’ve tried this and that. Dear God!
The snake oil guys that roamed the earth
In those days, a craze or fever,
Every third fellow claimed to be God,
As if earth itself, nervous at what it knew was in store,
Coughed up a swarm of lunatics.
So they’d heard about this one, and rolled their eyes.
But there were the crowds, and more than that
Was how they walked away amazed,
And when they spoke could only say
“This we have never heard before.”
And as for me, I’d been following too,
Waiting for what I couldn’t tell,
Recording the tremors at every stop.
And here I was in the back of the house,
He had just begun to speak,
When the roof began to crumble,
Dirt and straw and whatnot coming through.
There was a terrible din and the children laughed,
The old lady shouted and shook her fist
And a local curmudgeon was covered in dust.
The patch in the roof was lifted off
And in came the torturous sun
Then a shadow followed by
The mat coming through.
No one later could quite agree
Exactly what got said.
Much later, when the torpid spectacle had made the rounds,
Caressed by every broken hearted gossip,
It came down to this:
“Your sins are forgiven.”
This may be true, for all I know,
For who would not rise up,
Freed like a spring from its contraption,
From the cage of yesterdays and ancient wrongs,
The slag run-off of time and its regrets
Or hopes squandered like a drunkard’s coins,
The weight of all that past leaning in
And down on the joints of now,
On the crick in the neck, on the bone that cracks?
Who would not rise up
Were that stone rolled back
And the past revealed as an empty tomb?
Ten thousand, thousand shrieking suns
Have risen and sunk since that blasted day
When a flock of pigeons clattered up the sky
From the soot of the crumbling roof
And the crowds came and went
In the ancient clay.
Take up your analytic couches and walk!
Into your own dull daylight
Of rusted plumbing
And everything falling apart,
Take up your life as you would an ailing old friend
Whose hinges are off, whose limbs are unstrung,
Hoist him up—
Crafty, resourceful, shrewd to the end—
And walk.
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