By: Ronald Geigle
You don’t know it yet, though you ought to, especially because you claim to—in your holy voices. But God already gave it to the street-side sleepers and the sidewalk sayers, to the broken swashbucklers, to the garbled growling voices talking in their tremors. With their cigarette lips, bandaged eyes never looking away, they know, they see, and they laugh because they own it now, the rapture, the starry rapture—sliding in, accidentally really, to make up for all those years of bad luck and bad debt and broken budgets and bombs that blew. Maybe if you say this verse a few times, you’ll finally get it.
Ronald Geigle is a writer and poet living in Arlington, Virginia. His work has been published in Bluepepper, The New Mexico Review, and RavensPerch, and will soon be published in The Tilted House Review. He is the author of the 2014 novel, The Woods, set in the Pacific Northwest during the waning years of the Great Depression. ronaldgeigle.com
"In the Sermon on the Mount—one of the canons of Christianity—Jesus said, 'Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.' (Mathew 5:5) Though I am not a religious person, I learned this verse as a child and have always been struck by its beauty and humanity. So when right-wing politicians and evangelicals began using the Bible to support policies that harmed the poor and powerless, this verse came to mind. My poem is a quiet homily to those voices; a reminder to the powerful and pious that, according to their good book, even the most forgotten, beaten-down, and destitute will be rewarded the kingdom of heaven. "