Foot Washing

I could never understand her need to wash His feet;

I did not come from Magdalene's world,

That nervous sticky world

of anonymous diddling,

Which mixes its shekels

with blood and lies and spit,

And leaves its spineless remains

In the bellies of involuntary Beasts.

I came to this supper with my own morality,

And a stone in my hand.

(Such blindness in such a promising young man.)

She would have lied to you,

she would have lain with me-

And yet, she washes the feet

of an itinerant Messiah.

(A man whose grasp on God was never explained.)

In the lost days to come,

I will savor the costly spices,

And realize, at last,

How the repentant survive...