All I have to say about oligarchs and other power junkies.

Don't worry, it's short. And most of it is a poem.

Photo by Shail Sharma on Unsplash

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And because I’m me, it’s a poem about a Bible story. Stay tuned for a short rant after the poem ends.

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IN THE FIFTEENTH YEAR OF THE REIGN OF TIBERIAS                          (2025)


“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberias Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea and Herod was ruler of Galilee … during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness….”
    --  From the beginning of the third chapter of the Gospel According to Luke


The priests and king an emperor permits, 
the henchman he installs -- their powers and names 
no more than bookmarks in this story, frames in Caesar-time
for what happened really, for the Word of God
come to Zack’s boy there, to skinny John
out in the wild where he lived rough, prayed raw,
come to turn him toward the Jordan and its river, 
come to set him shaking like a trumpet 
with God’s loud call: come back, confess, 
be washed and be delivered -- not from Caesar, 
not from bookmark names and powers,
but out of bondage to the time they frame,
into the prophets’ season, to God’s Word
(looking, hello, just like that cousin 
of skinny John’s, you know the one I mean) 
side-stepping wielders of wealth and rule 
to make a feast instead with peasants, 
widows, orphans, vagrants, whores --
the ones who trudge the rough and crooked ways
and never dream of paths that smooth and straighten,
not till the season when the Word Made Flesh 
shrugs past the empire’s men, heads for the fields 
and fishing-boats to find his father’s children.

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One thing I’ll say about that cousin of John’s is that I fell in love early with his choices about how to pay attention, and to whom. I can say a lot more on this topic (oh, just ask me), but I actually promised to talk about something else today, so here that is:

All I have to say about oligarchs and other power junkies is that they’re boring — mostly because they’re barely interested in paying attention to anyone but themselves. Yes, we end up using their names as time-stamps and bookmarks (and cuss words), but the real living of real stories — stories of genuine love, mending, creativity — gets done by people ‘way more interesting. Firefighters. Grad students. Single moms. After-hours novelists. Utility workers. College kids with clipboards at the shopping center. Gray-haired volunteers welcoming guests at the food bank. So many stories, so many amazing people … and the guys with the loud voices and fancy shoes can’t be bothered. And the stories keep unfolding even so.

We get to choose how much attention we pay to which characters in the stories that unfold around us. We get to choose who we listen to, who we talk about, who we lift up. Not the first time you’ve heard that; it just seemed like a good time to mention it again.