My brothers sold me,
giving me into the hands of the flesh dealers,
the merchants of bone and blood;
sold me for a handful of gold…
my brothers, who shared my voice, my hearth, my tent—
jealousy ruled that moment as the wind whispered
in sand that cracked the lips and filled the throat,
‘your father found favor when looking in your eyes.’
A father’s love, like a technicolor coat,
can be a vicious thing; highlighting an absence
as much as it grants light to what is…
my brothers did not see me,
did not feel the bond with me, they experienced
the dreadful lack that drinks choices the way the antelope
drinks from the waterhole
leaving behind the hole in the heart
where a father’s regard should dwell.
The moment when the coins
were exchanged from opening hand
to cupped palm,
and I was handed over,
set a sound through history
repeated in the thirty pieces finding Judas
or the crowing of a cock and Peter’s future denials,
a sound that reverberate still
in man’s dealings with each other and with the planet.
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