Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

You love your land
They love your land
Both for what it was
Both for what it must be
Differing only in details
So you speak to them now
Reading from their book
Their hearts open, minds open
Pockets open
Does it matter whence help comes
When you have so few friends?
To save the land, or to redeem it
You are fellow-travelers
Ignoring the reckoning
That must eventually come

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They come by the droves to the desert
From another desert far away
These Texans, so anxious to climb
Holy mountains, holy tels
Tracing the footsteps of a man
Your people revile
They pay well, very well
They lap up the stories eagerly
Even a little bit of their religion
Thrown in like strong spice
Elicits rapture, hallelujiah
But at every turn from every group
The question eventually comes
What must we do to see you saved?
What do we have to do to send you
Home with a brand new religion?
If you take their money
You must take their wine, their bread

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Traitor they called him
Apostate from the faith
Cast out from the chosen
Banished from the elect
A powerful symbol for those
Who would see his nation saved
A powerful warning for those
Who would see it intact
As he preaches on the mount
Covered with bodies of his nation
Does he feel a twinge of regret
Or see only the gold-gilt dome
That sees both the he that was
And the he that is
As equally guilty

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Godly women are so very rare
The preachers on high proclaim
So when grey hairs crept in
Three men who had never met
Had godly women mailed to them
One from islands that had been America
One from a land America once warred for
One from America’s younger brother
It was equitable, they were saved
Shedding the Mass of youth for
Full immersion and comfort
Devout they were, devout they remained
But meeting on the holy land’s streets
While their men knelt and prayed
Talking in their adopted tongues
They wondered what might have been

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Divorce came early
He wasn’t a bad husband, just flighty
But his replacement provided a living
And three sons besides
The first child, a daughter, sought him
Found him fading, the picture crumbling
Edges inward, death with a smile
Devout, she sought healing in faith
One last chance to be a family
Perched in Gesthsemene
She on her knees, miracle on her lips
He, descening softy into night
Calling her by the name of the sister
He remembered from childhood
Resurrected in the garden

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They married young
He the strapping star of track and field
Already employed, assembling tractors
She the quietly pretty daughter, held close
Prepared for marriage as her only employ
She brought trunks of books with her
But no children as they grew soft, stooped
He loved her but did not understand her
Slept in while she kneeled before crosses
When the time came for renewal
There was only one option, the holiest land
Rock of ages, renewer of the faithful
He aimlessly cast stones off ancient ruins
As she bowed before Byzantine altars

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Some have called him a walkeing stereotype.
The man of God with soft Georgia twang
He embraces it gladly
For it means people he has never met
Seem to already know him
And yet his brows knit sometimes, frustrated
For it also means people he has never met
Seem to already reject him
Remembering perhaps a soft velvet twang
Wrapped about a mailed fist
Looming in their own past
When you seem like a man already known
You open yourself, a vessel, to the past

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