Missionary to Sodom
- Missionary to Sodom
Oh, when and where should one begin?
The spinning of the carousel
does marvels to the human eye.
For being in a fatal spin,
what marvels we’ve denied.
The colors of the carnival,
the awful reds and blacks
which flame and foment anarchies,
have brightened in this amber light.
The ponies, on their backs as well…
Have splendored into porcelain,
their horsemen. And the energy,
of all this futile spinning, must
imbue the spirit of a man
with hopefulness. I trust…
That in those faces I have seen
(whom destiny has joined to me
by making them my family),
I may resolve more than the masks
which I have worn. Alas…
They are converging now,
the ones who in their movement seem
but ghosts of me. And they convene
to make a portrait of the man
whom, in so many ways, I’ve been.
I see, I see, and recognize
now in the mirror, whom they say
has butchered millions and allied
with Satan. Are my eyes
the same as what they’ve seen…
When they have chanced to look upon
a murder? It would seem,
the standard pay for seeing well
is death. And I, whose eyes have been put out,
may in my blindness tell…
That all the ones who’ve come and stood
on slightly-higher-than-the-ground
have lied. Is it allowed
that some mere reader of the page
may read the Word aloud?
What is it in these dog-eared books
(the Bible, Torah and Koran),
that draws from men such Godless sounds
when they are telling whom they can
that they must read to understand?
A man I’d been expecting came,
just as the crowd was thinning out.
And rivers of opinion went
like echoes into silence. Then,
we were a muddy pool again.
But I, a mimic of the beast
who spoke in tongues, addressed those men
who loitered by the mountain’s base,
and thrust upon their disbelief
a truthful language. I was brief…
When I, as I was spinning round
and casting meanings into waste,
twice whispered what I meant, then said
that spinning in a circle with your eyes closed
is a very,very dangerous thing.