The Treasury
“...contributing to the treasury…
she out of her poverty
has put in everything she had…”
Mark 12:43-44
I see him standing there
in his long black coat and hat,
his prolific gray beard
having never been trimmed,
the feathers of his
sidelocks
at the corners of his
bobbing head
catching flight in the
morning breeze.
He mumbles his prayers
from the treasury of his heart
and places scraps of
paper in the crags of the stone wall.
Gray matter her wailing
wall and prayer book,
she reaches in and pulls
out
tattered and faded
souvenirs
of times and places her
heart has been broken.
She recites those
memories back to her God
and reminds him of
promises he may have forgotten.
For some unexplained
reason,
my thoughts go back to
our Gulf Coast
beaches last summer
when sand and sea lay
hidden
beneath several feet of
thick, brown sargassum,
rank and decaying.
It had washed onto the
shores from the heart of the ocean.
The tourist industry
wanted to sweep it away so its trade would flourish,
but ecologists ask us to
let it stay.
As it piles up and rots,
it not only holds tiny
and fiercely biting mosquitos,
but also holds the sands
and allows dunes to
build
preventing the beaches
from eroding.
His scraps of paper,
her faded memories,
rank seaweed from the
ocean depths
all prayer.
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