Abraham's Consequence:

Carry this wood for me son,

On your back, a burden

For I am so old now, born down

By Time and though I can still walk,

Yet my back permanently is stooped

And I cannot carry the weight of my youth.

Come my son, we have far to walk

And my footsteps have shrunk and fall

In the creases of your large strides.

Across the blighted terrain we must journey

Into the day and through the night

Until we reach the mountain’s crowning.

There we will burn a lamb (hush son

Don’t ask where the creature is now, anon

All will be revealed) innocent

As the day’s breaking of night

So that our sons and their son’s sons

Will spread across this empty planet.

…And here is the punch in my guts

I feel when I read this ancient text —

What did the son feel? oh we know about Abraham,

How he withstood the test

Ready to burn his only son at God’s behest —

But it’s the child’s mind I wonder about…

How must it have been…laying there

On that pile of gathered wood (that he himself had carried –

And here think of that other son and his carried wood)?

Wood drenched with a flammable liquid,

The father with a lighted torch, madness in Abraham’s eyes

For surely the test would bring us to that point —

What did Isaac think of God

As he lay upon his back

On the wood stack, the torch already alight,

The fire ready to leap across the gap;

What did he think of his father, Abraham,

Of himself cast as sacrificial lamb?

And did Isaac ever forgive—is it possible to have a choice,

Can a son can forgive his father

When his father listened to The Voice;

Took the son to the mountain peak

And prepared to set the son’s flesh to burn,

In the name of faith, a sacrifice?

Now imagine the tears shed on that walk home

Flowing freely down the crevasses of ancient Abraham—

He understood the damage done,

The reverberation to be felt through all the centuries;

Fathers and sons ceaselessly engaged

In the conflict between the lamb and the beast.

And this brings me to my point—

Nations make the same selection

And we call it war

The god of our nations, calling us to send

Our uniformed and lumbered children out into the world

And sacrifice them for the common good.

Abraham must surely have known

What his actions had set in motion;

And Isaac, was he filled now with an unexplainable angst,

A desire to lose the lamb and become a wolf,

Rend the father limb from limb

And replace the old order with the new?

Then there is the mother, left behind,

(And all this time it is still an immoveable fact),

Standing there at the opened door,

Her eyes drained from the day spent

Staring into a distance greater

Than any male god ever understood.

And in that face I see Mary

As Christ carried his wood

And the face of every mother

As their son marches off to war,

Lambs all of them caught in the fates

Of the old men’s making.

In that face I see my mother,

Standing as she so often did;

Her hands crinkling the venetian blinds,

Her teary eyes staring out

Into the darkest of night, waiting for her son

To return safely home once again.