Here Try Some of This Ointment

 

Spirit is risen forever in these surging
weeks of spring. Greentide rolls along,
letting go of drudge, finding new
ways to release our keeps. All thralls
be free as a word now, flown from gated
impunity. Everyone first no rotten
eggs as light floods an empty tomb,
skips on from Easter into Poetry Month,
May Day, Pentecost, Juneteenth, the
works. Also our Wedding Anniversary.

We married each other solus,
just us and our maker on the sunny
tracks of Knoxville, stretching our
legs in that hillbilly hub dubbed
for a founding father, home of
Mayor Dempster, of dumpster fame.
We were recycle-or-die fry hatched
in grassroots dreams of no waste.
After jumping ties we chewed the
good news over falafel with a
gentle co-op organizer and a
wildwood poet dressed in pink.*

Love encircles us every day.
When we allow her inside she 
transforms the forlorn, even softens
the hearts of corporate lords and
power-mad candidates for king.
Her holiness melts and reshapes
authority into figures like Mary of Bethany,
the anointer of Jesus. She oiled his skin
with treasured herb, inspired the name
of a child I met during a formative
visit with folks of humble means.

“Fetch our guest a chair Nard,”
urged Grandma, in my hometown
where cash can trash or glorify families.
This social rub ruins communities from
Appalachia to Palestine and Israel,
Surely in Bethany, a.k.a. Al-Eizariya,
after Lazarus, who Jesus called
back from death after four days cold.
Apostles were chilling there on
“Good Wednesday” when Mary opened
her alabaster jar full of precious nard,
proved she wasn’t messing around.

Dudes cringed at her gift of fine
ointment they could have traded for
coin. Yet Jesus defended Mary’s deed.
“You always have the poor with you,”
he said. “And you can do what is
good for them whenever you want but
you don’t always have me.” His
teachings are snubbed in many
jurisdictions, though legions sport
his name. In unreported ways love
continues to practice forgiveness and
care for the least among us.

Also “Spy Wednesday,” because a
familiar hand grabs at the story.
Why does Judas do it? Maybe he cares
less about the common good than he
does keeping coffers filled for the good of
the order. Maybe he’s jonesing for a
nice scripture studio in some clean
settlement – cool digs where connected
rebs can hang, discuss scroll arts,
throw down some righteous runes.
If that’s what motivates Judas,
I can relate for damn sure.

Love chooses and changes us anyway,
praise be, so we’re able to tend the
garden, me ruminating on words amid
loads of cured manure from a barn
where another Mary could have given
birth or maybe helped her husband
fix beams after a family trip to Egypt.
Physical work makes writing feel
productive. Full wheelbarrows
prompt me to flash on a scene from
the movie “Origin,” based on a 
beautiful labor by Isabel Wilkerson.

The man gently covers his untouchable
peer with oil as they prepare to clean
latrines. Miss Isabel’s work exposes a
founding script — how hierarchs build
empires by treating humans as livestock,
dumping on scapegoats. Love
supplants this shit-show of throwaway
soul with kindness grown in the
soil of remorse and shared grief.
Spiritual sap wells up in the
anointings of word-nerds who’ve
toiled on the other side of privilege.

Yet stories can also reveal wounds
Upon wounds that trick our healing.
This hit me in words heard beyond the
Racist bounds of my Southland’s
Former confederacy. A light-skinned
Scion of old Northwest trade said how
much it cuts, when blood breeds status,
For heirs of that quantum to be forced
Into the caste of manual labor. My
Heart sank when he paired this
Grievance with the claim that his
Ancestors “treated their slaves well.”

Once upon a jubilee people led by
example. Culture steered toward mutual
respect, away from headship stacked on
capitol, chattel and lineage. Imagine
life where everyone pitches in with a
mix of chores and creative leisure.
One barely fathoms this balance from
today’s towers of ranking prey, where
pharaoh says “Might makes right,” and
Herod says “yessir please.”

Supremacy runs in many tribes,
surely mine, even if we gloss over that
line in our membership agreement.
We’re coached in the will to sacrifice
others, crucify to cleanse man’s
dominion. Thank goodness women like
you have endured, loves like Mary and
Ms. Isabel and also Effie Isabel, a
hardworking grandma who helped
raise me and my siblings, who told us
wild hilltop stories, poured out the
healing oil of wisdom.

Miss Effie shared medicine as potent
as the tools in Solomon’s temple.
“Ain’t nobody better’n anybody else.”
You would have loved each other.
I offer this poem as a marriage gift in
her memory, springing up prayers
for life without waste, where no
soul submits to a force that would
harden Pharaoh’s heart, order
kings to commit genocide, or
harm the meek among us who
recycle our song of salvation.

*Thanks Peggy D. and David W.
for sharing our wedding feast.
Decades affirm that ceremony at
Ground zero was no waste!