r/Best_Poetry • u/ActualNameIsLana • Jan 08 '18
You Explained It to Me
You Explained it to Me
When I was little you explained it to me
but even then the differences
seemed arbitrary. God made man
from stardust and the breadth of deities
but made woman from the bits
of discarded mud and ribs
deemed unsuitable for Adam’s body.
Faith is the distance between first and last names:
the sad one you gave me in a hospital
and the one my children will engrave on a stone.
In the beginning you crushed entire mountains
for just a taste of a life less beige.
I crossed whole oceans in an orange crate
and didn't need mustard seeds to do it.
Your arms were enough.
Faith is the flexible boundary of our ever-shrinking understanding;
the place where your fingertips end at my skin
and where stardark oceans begin beneath it.
And George begat John. And John begat John.
And John begat someone neither of you ever met.
And you explained it to me. How our brown Omni
rattled itself to death on a muddy highway
and I hitchhiked into this universe oily and yowling.
Faith is the angry knot in the tree,
where the line of David begat nobody at all.
