NOTE FROM LB
Unlikely as it always has felt to me, I’ve spent a significant amount of time working with people in China. Teaching, mostly, and even being called “Maestro” by important men and women who have been my students there.
This strikes me as pretty damned mystifying, but there it is. Delusions of grandeur, do you think? So do I. But here’s one of the results of such a delusion:
I Dreamed I was the Messiah
by Larry Brody
I dreamed I was the Messiah,
Speaking to the multitudes.
The amphitheater was glorious,
Carved out of red rock that stretched upward ‘til it kissed the
Blessing we call the sun.
No television ministry for this son of God!
No electronics! Only the real—the dirt, the mud, the clay.
I heard the earth talking, calling me home, but first I had a message to give.
Direct from Our Father Who Art it came,
Rolling in like a wave, gathering a glistening sea strength
That crashed over parched desert so secretly alive.
“Repent!” I kept thinking, like all the Revivalists and
Medicine Show saints.
But, “Forgive,” is what I said.
My gaze rested on each of my listeners. Millions, there were, but
I saw them one by one. And as I looked, I understood their
Harsh lives. Their pasts, their presents, their futures revealed
Themselves in each tiny gesture, each etched line, each
Mournful sound. I knew each man’s hunger, each woman’s despair.
I lived my congregation’s fear, and its anger, and its greed,
And felt every cause, every reason, every excuse push at me
In a backwash of hope.
The pain knocked me to my knees. The red dust filled my nose and mouth.
No breathing for this son of God!
Yet still I spoke only the real.
“Forgive,” I said,
And awoke, desperate, sucking in air. I gulped it down into my
Belly, turned to look at my love still asleep.
Awakened, I knew I was no son of the Big Father,
Yet still the dream was real.
We are all Messiahs, dying for all Mankind’s sins,
Even while we struggle to rise beyond the dirt, the mud, the clay.
We are all Messiahs, who must learn:
“Forgive.”
###
Larry Brody is the head dood at TVWriter™. He is posting at least one poem a week here at TVWriter™ because, as the Navajo Dog herself once pointed out, “Art has to be free. If you create it for money, you lose your vision, and yourself.” She said it shorter, though, with just a snort.
