FOR HE WAS ENVIOUS
...seeing the peace of sinners
--Psalm 72
That day he made raspberry jam.
He’d picked the berries
two days earlier.
Second harvest of red and golden
from the berry farm
a couple of miles from his home.
The frozen kind.
That afternoon, walking the development
where construction workers with hammers
built homes in the uprooted, torn-out orchard
where his grandchildren gleaned apples,
he felt wind blowing dirt from backhoes,
and smoke in his eyes from Goat Rocks Fire
where he still hiked and skied,
he remembered—he and his wife
were serving meals that evening at Camp Hope,
the shelter. He’d have to pick it up.
These men, los marjinados, wearing
hooded orange sweatshirts for sun protection.
The builders. Not the homeless.
His wife had told him
Julie had made sixteen loaves
of bread that day. He’d been reading
the 72d Psalm for two weeks.
He couldn’t get past it.
From the Coptic Psalter. That, too.
He had failed to move on.
But Thou art my portion.
That one came to him
from Sandy Hook seven years ago.
Mi herencia.
Marked in his bilingual Santa Biblia.
All this moving and he’s still stuck.
He would take some jam
with him for Julie to the shelter.
Jim Bodeen
11 October 2022
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