Poem: “Table”

Table

By Patrick T. Reardon

 

Let the sparrow take a chair at

the Juneteeth table with Elijah,

with Godot, with the lost tribes

and the communion of saints and

the lyrics trivia-players, the

postal-truck child, the guilty one,

the noduled one, the non-prophets

and the false prophets and the

profit-takers, and the insurrectionist

authors, the beep-beep-beep backing

cement truck, the funeral home-ists,

the dead and the not-yet-dead and

the newly quickened.

 

 

Let the sparrow nest in the choir loft,

in a neighborhood of bright yellow birds

and reds, and greens, blues, grays, blacks,

weaving hymns and canticles, alive with

flutter about the white marble pillars and

vaulted ceiling and foot-washing altar,

ceremony of endless day.

 

 

Let the sparrow join every marred one,

every roughened one, every one with

fracture, stain, taint, at the midnight

tables before the McDonald’s on Broadway

below the university, above the el station,

silent as transubstantiation in summer heat,

awaiting the parade of error-makers with

the monstrance, procession of fools and

half-fools and empty vessels and buffoons

and bozos and the white wafer as the

magnet draws invisibly every atom of all

time into a single pebble at the center

of nothing.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

3.13.25

This poem originally appeared in Reformed Journal on 2.25.25.