A Hundred Mercies

better days

A HUNDRED MERCIES

You work on the heavy bag
Knuckles wrapped in tape
Caught up in the web of youth
Fighting to escape
I watched you eat the darkness
And spit the stars back out
It seemed to me that certainty
Was clouding you with doubt
Open up your hand, my son
There’s something you have missed
A hundred mercies sleep inside
Your solitary fist

You come to me with longing, girl
Your mouth a lonesome bruise
Standing on the stairwell
In your San Francisco shoes
Your father hailed from Athinai
By way of Kingston gates
You listen to the Wailers now
Dance on broken plates
Open your hand, Larisa
I know you hide a rose
The petals fall like bandages
To wrap your bleeding toes

I looked for you in the Bible
I looked in the Qu’ran
Found a handkerchief in Mecca
In Ankor Wat, a fan
At the wall in old Jerusalem
I threw my hat away
Slept at the shrine of Hypnos
Bleeding from the knees
The monks, I heard them giggle in
The Amaravati night
Everywhere your shadow was
The evidence of light

I took the journey backward
Went back beyond my birth
To the oldest written stories
The gods still walked the earth
Gilgamesh and Enkidu
Osiris and Zeus
To the hundred mercies
The first saint of the blues
Sharing tea with Augustine
Anansi came as well
Seems to me that heaven’s just
A tea garden in hell

My son follows the footsteps
Larisa follows, too
Ahead to the beginning
The best that we can do
Is wrap our knuckles deep in tape
Make partner with the blues
Dance with a hundred mercies
In our San Francisco shoes
Open up your hand, my friend
There’s something we have missed
Tomorrow’s map may hide inside
The solitary fist

DL