Free Entry 1, Week 15

Original Draft for this week's Free Entry:

I pricked myself
while sewing this morning.
It’s been a long time
since I’ve seen my own blood.
I was birthed in a pool of it.
I started wailing the blues
when the doctor whacked my bottom
on the day I was born. That was when I realized
that we need boys
so that they can grow up
and become shadows.
History has not demanded
their premature demise.
That they die in war is a matter
of necessity. Which men die,
is a matter of circumstance.
The rocky roads they travel
in war withstand their chariots
of fire, but man alone cannot.
This is when he takes God off the shelf:
when easy turns rough and hard,
like He’s a pot-bellied Buddah.
They rub the pregnant swell of His stomach
and pray until the trouble dissipates.
He then returns to the shelf,
and they return to the shadows.


Revised Draft for this week's Free Entry:

Mend

I prick myself when sewing for hours,
birthing a pool of blood. I wail
the blues as the doctors whack
the bottomless souls of babies.
They are boys that must become shadows.
Black cloaks vested in a shroud of fire.
Don’t demand a premature demise in war;
necessary skeletons become circumstantial.
Their rugged femurs dusted in combat,
vanquishing chariots of fire where man
alone cannot. The pregnant swell of His
stomach is rubbed, rough and ragged,
to scrub knobby tribulations into molten
ash before they return to the black cloaks…
to His coat-rack: The Messiah’s pot-bellied
Buddah. He shivers without His blanket
too; it is for him that I sew.