Parishioner

Parishioner


Posted signs read ‘No Loitering, Police Take Notice,’
  No police take notice

His head upon a duffel bag,
He’s sleeping rough on the foundation stone, rough cut,
  At the foot of the fieldstone steeple,
The stone laid wide in lieu of tower gutters
  To run rain to ground away from the foundation

Fetal curled on his side, he holds his hands
  Under his head, as with prayer hands,
To turn him vertical (from his current lay)
  And he’d look the whispering child, kneeling in his pew

Year ago, we had the first cardboards in the alley,
  Down by the basement fire door, soon accompanied
With the trash bags of clothes, maybe
  Really big Church mice?
We’d had no break ins, no vandals,
  I didn’t want to be the rat

But last week it was a bottle of pear brandy,
  Half drunk, in the window ledge above him now,
I took the bottle to the bus stop trash,
  Where two transient men said they’d seen it (on the window ledge),
I wondered was the bottle theirs, telling them
 “If you know whose this is,
  Tell him I left it here for him”

  I don’t think it theirs now,
Those old bags of clothes under the handicap ramp
  Have filled the space, they’re spilling out,
Watching him sleep, one shoe off,
  An earworm whispers me a gospel:
“Then he began … and dried them with the towel that girded him”

Adding new Parishioners
  Is not something that’s new,
Learning Jesus teaching, times,
  An awkward thing to do