Scribe

By Norman Finkelstein

You enter the city with harps and with flutes,

with drums and with baskets

of grapes and pomegranates.

You enter the city of blue ash and blue spruce,

that terraced city rumored of the spirit.

You come there as would a fire,

but neither you nor anything you touch is burned.

There is no sign upon you,

but there are signs upon the doorposts,

amulets of silver shaped like a hand

with letters upon the palm and fingers.

You wander into the little streets

unguarded by leopards or the statues of leopards,

where love is brought to you like an offering

stolen from the altar of a civic deity

who blesses the family with contentment.

You may say you have failed your calling,

that your riches and your debts have taken you this far

and will take you farther, you who have traded

upon yourself and upon the idols that you broke and reassembled.

You have written a history of renunciation

and a genealogy of indulgence,

mistaking pleasure for experience

and experience for wisdom.

You have raised your voice against the sufficiency of silence,

and answered by silence you were silenced,

but never with sufficient severity

and never without sufficient hope.

You have heeded the word of the outside god

and you have heeded the word of no god at all,

like a prophet turned archaeologist,

a scribe turned into a scribe.

Source: The Ratio of Reason to Magic (Dos Madres Press, 2016)