Get Real

To make art, to make things
out of other things, to engage
in artifice, a confidence game:
“Get real,” your critics say.
The earth is a rug
constantly being pulled
out from under you.

The artificial is real: the bread
and wine camouflage the need
to sacrifice the poor lost lamb,
not to mention the virgin,
created by man made
design critics to avoid
her real predicament:

“Poor and rich belonged to the same world and placed themselves on a common, even sliding scale, but beggars could not. The ptochos was someone who had lost many or all of his family and social ties. He was a wanderer, therefore a foreigner for others, unable to tax for any length of time the resources of a group to which he could contribute very little or nothing at all…a ptochos was a shocking reality for the Greco-Roman world” (272). 1

“The beatitude of Jesus declared blessed, then, not the poor but the destitute, not poverty but beggary…Jesus spoke of a Kingdom not of the Peasant or Artisan classes but of the Unclean, Degraded, and Expendable classes” (273). 2

1. Gildas Hamas quoted in John Dominic Crossan’s “The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant” (272). 2. Crossan gloss of Gerhard Lenski (273).

Who then or now could write
a poem who is not at least poor
real poor or in spirit or metaphor?
Yet the beggars make their signs
and hold up their poems
along the roadsides,
the least of publications,
the yeast of city life.

“What is needed, then, is not insight into the Kingdom as future but a recognition of the Kingdom as present. For Jesus, a Kingdom of beggars and weeds is a Kingdom of here and now” (Crossan, 283).

What is real
will not be
found staring
at the universe
through artificial eyes
to catch a glimpse
of dawn’s first light,
nor descending
to the bottom
of the sea
in rich pods
to study ancient
shipwrecks,
nor in any travel
nor in any poem.

But surely we must
avoid the real
at all cost
and become more
artificial.