Almost Paradise Summer 2000

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Bethlehem during the Reign of King Herod the Great:

The Massacre of the Innocents

A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because her children are no more.

—Jeremiah 31:15

And now the exiled sun flexes into a pietà,

prostrate, cradling the hills behind the village,

dousing the flat roofs with pallid light.

Tonight, the Sabbath is given to wandering

the streets: men and women shamble, shawled

within an infancy of grief. Their shadows crawl

over baskets, cisterns, bricks, straw, then crumble

into one another, the lacework of their silhouettes

shading, soft as nard, into a seamless veil.

A mother meanders through the deserted

market. Her feet weave avenues of hieroglyphics,

the translation shifting and dimming in the dirt.

And a father lingers in a doorway, his fingertips

on the lintel, faltering over the Law—the blood

will be a sign for you on the houses where you live;

and when I see the blood, I will pass over you.

All through the town, parents recount

a history of deliverance: the land

promised, a land of water from the rock-

not this land of hyssop and barren bluffs,

this arid country shrouded in a royal vow.

Children of Moses, unguent for a king's wounds,

you are poured out like water, and all your bones

are out of joint. Pulped, pounded to powder,

you are mixed with bulrushes, balsam, oil: chrism

golden as a chosen boy, his eyes like cups of sun

running over; you are the salve, the ransom

for a child who, far from this city, is drawn out

of his bathwater, is cuddled, soothed

with cooling balms, wrapped in spotless cloths.

His mother and father regard him:

how immaculate he is after his bath, how free

from taint; surely he must be favored, this child

of David the ...

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