Elijah

I.

I was grasping for sticks to make a fire
when I saw him enter the city gates.
He called to me,
fetch him a drink of water, he said.
The nerve, I thought. First thing the man
does when he hits town
is look for some woman to wait on him.
But there was something about him

that made me start over toward the well.
Then he called out again:
and some bread, too.
My anger was too large to break
from the heart that held it, withered
by the image of a pallid boy.
If he only knew…….
Bread, the enervating lack of it.
All I had was a handful of flour.
I would cook that for me and my son.
Then it would all be over -
Our last supper, I guess you could say.
Bereft of hope, my anguish
spilled out into words and my dignity
onto the ground
as he stood there and told me
to go home. Make some bread for him -
and then for me and my son, he said.
His god would provide, he said.
What have I got to lose.
One more meal and we die anyway.
What are a few hours of life - more
or less.
Why not take a chance
with this bedraggled stranger.
There was something about him…

or was it my heart, just weary from pumping
in a wasteland,
that made me ride his promise from despair to his
God of the Never-Barren Flour Barrel.

II.

His forehead was the sun and his sweat
the rain that sizzled on barren rocks
in the heat of a land too desolate even for the
almighty god of that old man.

My boy shook with the fever
that filled his veins, then went limp.
Where are you, old man, you
and your evermore god?
I give you bread and you give me a son
with no breath left in him.
I give you a pallet of straw to sleep on
and you repay with pain.

Give the boy to me, he said,
and he took him from me and laid him
on his own straw bed.
I wanted to get close but stopped.
He took my anger and made it his,
and with a madness in his eyes, stretched
himself over my boy three times, screaming
to his god. What has the woman
done to you, he cried. What kind of god
will not put life back into an innocent boy.
I heard a whirlwind
of breath enter my boy's mouth,
then the sweet exhale.

He put my son back into my arms,
living and breathing.
I know now you are a true man of god, I said.
He turned and walked away,
saying nothing, with a left-over-from-rage
light of darkness in his eye.

III.

It's been years now since he left us
to go meet with that troublesome Ahab.
Who is taking care of him now?
Before me, he had the ravens.
His cot is still on the roof.
There, where he shook his fists
at his god. This morning
I went to draw water from the well -
near the city gate
where I first saw him.
The dirt under my feet had a bronze glow
unusual for that time of day.
On the horizon the sky was a slide show
of pink, then orange, then a ball
of bright crimson
caught in the wind that carried it
up toward the ravens.
His god was working the projector.


Copyright © Susan Love Fitts, 2001