Came the
circus to town
I stood
in line
Bought
my ticket
Expectations
low
And was surprised
For a
change the clowns weren’t sad
Clearly
they’d made love all afternoon
The
acrobats had wings
But were
human after all
One of
them cried after falling into the net
I could
tell that one of the horses was galloping
In a
parallel universe
Defying
the whip
The mama
elephant with huge scars on her side
Cut
short her routine
To nuzzle
her calf
A terrified
girl in the crowd
Was being
comforted by a frightened boy
“The sawdust
on the cuffs of my pants
Is so beautiful,”
I
thought
“I’ll put
my head into the lion’s mouth”
And I
did
I did
I did!
That day
I was
-- to
paraphrase MacLeish --
Seven of
the nineteen good people in the world
--
New York, October 9, 2012
1 comment:
someone besides myself has MacLeish on the brain? Hooray! "Surely" his/your quote is a take on the old Hassidic parable: basically that the world is so F-ed up that god would in anger destroy it, except for a handful of inconspicuous saints who go about their very humble occupations in a saintly way. There's a Hebrew word for it, and -- because its Jewish, an exact number of these tzadiks. Shlomo Carleback has(if I remember right) as story about one of these-- a guy who carries potatoes.
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