Sick Pilgrim
White scar like thread runs up and down my wrist, not because I tried to die that time,
but because a rabbit didn’t want to die, an old buck, a king who misplaced his kingdom in a row of hutches,
and we were butchering, and he kicked out once, writing his resistance in one long red line.
We were using cudgels, but the man drove his fist into the quivering head, and blood painted his face and mine.
Later, trussed legs lay crossed like a maiden’s ankles in a bowl of brine, and later still
served up with herbs, and garlic, wine that sings like blood and tastes of trees green in a forgotten dream,
I set a feast before my friends: blessed art thou, o lord our God, who gives us the fruits of the earth.
The hardest part is not the work of art, the work of love.
The hardest part is cleaning up afterwards.
I think of Judith, fasting in her tent, and arrayed in all her jewels,
the silent trepidations as she prepared parched corn, and figs, and bread, and cheese.
When the sleeping amorous general lay prone beneath the blade
we know her arm was strong, and we know that she was beautiful
and virtuous, and bold. We know she wrapped the bloodied head
in canopies, and then, it says, after a while, she went forth
and called upon the watchmen at the gates.
We know they sang:
blessed be the Lord who made heaven and earth,
who hath directed thee to the cutting off the head
of the prince of our enemies.
But it doesn’t tell you how she dealt with the blood-spattered room,
how she washed herself clean of the impurities (for a woman
touched with blood was not seen fit to come before the altar of the Lord),
and after all a woman’s work it was to set all neat, silent in the home –
and yet she, one of the handmaids, creatures of the turning moon,
smote the foe, shed his blood, and afterwards as his bewildered ghost went searching
through the tents for his lost kingdom, his shattered goblet of dreaming wine,
she was bent over cleaning, mopping up his blood.
–Rebecca Bratten Weiss
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