To make me feel more welcome in their home,
the new neighbor, Mrs. Kelly, told me her doctor’s a Jew,
and she wouldn’t consider any other kind.
I was small and thought that friendly and fine,
till one of her sons—Fat Bob, I think,
asked me why I killed the baby Jesus
which sent me crying from their house.
The moms thought we could patch this up,
but first I made mine swear
that all this Easter-stuff—
not the pretty eggs in the basket,
nor the man in the Kelly’s entry way
asleep and hanging from the cross—
had anything to do with us.
Still, I felt uneasy Easter morning
when I went to pick a chocolate bunny
from their crèche of green excelsior,
where, Bobby assured me, the now-risen Jesus
had been laid to rest just yesterday,
and, he said, sort of kindly,
it was partly thanks to me.
Alan Walowitz has been published various places on the web and off. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2017 and 2018 and is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry. His chapbook Exactly Like Love is available from Osedax Press, and his full-length book The Story of the Milkman and other poems will appear shortly from Truth Serum Press.
