Probably a good way to scare most potential readers off...

I could have perhaps entitled this, "How not to start off a blog 101", but I'm going to go ahead and go through with it because it is, I think, the last thing I wrote (the suburbs seem to be making me - let's say "less intellectually active"- I don't think I've really thought about anything since returning to Mandeville). Anyway, a poem (please don't let that stop you from reading on, although it might stop me) I wrote about a month ago. Not really sure if it's any good, but I write poems to help me think about stuff, especially to wrestle with Scripture. Lots of different ideas going on here- Jacob meeting with Esau after his own wrasslin' match with God, Esau's carpe diem mindset ("I'm hungry and this birthright ain't feeding me") put alongside Jacob's deceptiveness and his own inability to wait, all confronted by Jesus in the Eucharist.
Oh and points and a big gold star to anyone who can spot the third "twin" in the poem. Enjoy it, because if you catch it and know why he counts as a twin, you're probably a bit of a nerd...

To my brother, to redeem the time
You took it seriously,
For that you should be praised, I think.
You took the moment and recognized fullness
How were you to know, my brother, that I'd set a snare

We aren't so very different you know
Look past the pelts and hair, the quiet cleverness,
Your strength and my limp
The blood, the faults-the same

I wanted to be you, to feel a father's love
To win
Time mattered- the trap sprung just so
The quick eye catching, the fingers loosing
The little smile as the hart stumbled
To put your hand in its side
To feel the holes you'd made
To know

At last I'd done it, I was you
It was a moment that united us
At last you knew, the hunger, the malaise
How it comes, so regularly, you cease to act
How meaning evacuates the day
Slips its noose- but now it was caught
Meaning in a meal

Side by side before the roiling red we made
The meal that was your birthright
We made one man
Deceiver and deceived
You gave yourself to it in despair, to save your life
I in hope- time redeemed
But the meal-
the meal, dear Esau, was for us all

-7/16/09