In the Witch-Hunting Season
I tell you, don’t trust the living. Their eyes
go mad for practice. They’re possessed, possessing.
Give them one good Friday and they’re up and ready
with nails and religions. Hysteria’s their mother.
There’s a scratch in them that won’t heal.
They have twelve fingers sticky with bleeding.
Get thin. Put by some dying before you’re owned
hock shank and marrow, and out nailing Jews
for fat reasons. Get a grave behind you.
What else made the Sahara a saints’ suburb
and singed the mob at the city gates when the bones
strolled back as easy as gypsies, all their own?
Ask Ezra at St. Elizabeth’s mismanaging
a dozen languages in a rage of tricks
to pile all Hells into one dictionary.
Ask Blake head first in the tiger’s mouth. Ask Donne
being bad for God. Ask Byron being bad.
Ask Dr. Johnson what he’s doing dead
when grammar’s cracking wider every day–
paid-in-full Lazarus, the one safe
man in all dangerous Judea, is my saint.
—John Ciardi
—found in As If: Poems New and Selected (1955)