The Book
Alexander Best

I open the book, rather, the Book.
Is the Answer within these thousand-odd onion-skin pages?
No.
But it’s an amazing lifespan’s read, just the same, about folks
(dead, all of ’em)
who were rough, sweet, ignorant. Naah, Hollywood/science
can’t crack this nut—and I’m
glad in that.

My
favourite exasperating character is
Jesus: son of man, born of woman, had that
divine spark—the same one burns in the billions of us.
He was a flesh-and-blood human being, like you and me,
but he was more than that. A

Deep and subtle thinker: simple, oblique, and rich in his
Word; a vagrant who was a holy man (such as the
Hindus have). And, once he
got known—those wonders with the loaves and fish, the
Leper and Lazarus, not to mention: the guy walked on water—
he was given no peace,
not even on Sundays.

The multitude trailed him, and here and there he sought an
evening’s quiet in high-up mountain hollows where he
lay with his head on a stone pillow, and
still his restless spirit wouldn’t quit. Well…

Jesus came to a bad end, which was typical back then for
anyone stubborn and puzzling who appeared to
spring from nowhere.

People picture Jesus as a Hippie or Rastafarian, only
Jesus was more intelligent, sexy, and strange
than any social type that grew out of the twentieth century.

A poem is irritating if it goes on for long…but not the Book.
and Jesus’ biography’s merely several chapters in it.
The Book’s plenty to read, for three-score-years-and-ten
(or however many grains of sand remain in your hourglass).

I open my heart as wide as I’m able.
I close the Book.
This is enough for one day.

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