by Laura Rodley
Rise up and you can walk, Jesus said.
Did they have cancer then?
What if they hadn’t crucified him
What if he’d stayed alive
and taught everyone around him
the gift of healing
and those people went forward
to teach others the gift of healing
and there wasn’t as much illness or pain
and it was like that for the last 2009 years;
what songs we’d be singing,
what birds, the bobolink would
still be filling the air,
the sky purple black
with the cloud of their passing
as they fly south
rather than the weak V formation of geese
or scattering of sparrows on the wire.
Ah, if Jesus lived, forgive me
but perhaps it’s true he does or
at least his message, perhaps a healing
touch resides in us all
a poem we may give a song
we might sing, a hand we
might hold, a hug we give
the point being to give away, to give.
Laura Rodley's chapbook Rappelling Blue Light was nominated for a Mass Book Award. Nominated fora Pushcart Prize, her work has been in anthologies, Massachusetts Review and many others. On the advisory board of the Collected Poet Series, she works as a freelance writer and photographer.
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