Glory

By dusk
The cross is dust,
A smudge on my forehead
A stranger kindly
Tells me is there,

Smeared by wind,
Oils of skin,
And the delicate sweat of a heated office;

Indeed I am dust
If donning the ashes
Feels like penance;
I am possessed
By what They might think;

And every Lent, whatever I elect
To forswear
Demands to be eaten, done, or seen
A thousand times more urgently -
It seems I stretch
For the knotholes and chinks
In any fence I erect,

And every Lent, I think,
"Why all this fasting,
Why the ash?
We know how this ends." -

Because Christ wept just
Before raising His friend,
Because death goes down
With one Hell of a sting.

In the crosswalk
I pass a fellow penitent, death stamped
On his brow,
His head, perhaps, aching
In the throes of withdrawal;

The desert is peopled by nomads like us,
Pitching tents with shaking hands,
Mouths full of sand crying kabod!
Straining to see, by fire or cloud,
God.