The Remnant: Lazarus Curses the Upstart God

DB Jonas

They came straight through town
in those days, streaming thick as thieves 
along the roads that wander 
through all our hillside villages, 
alone, mostly,
but sometimes in little scuffling bands
led by their ecstatic, bedraggled visions
in search of an audience
and always grateful for a crust.

Each one of them delivered urgent news
of divinity’s most recent fit of peeve, 
and all the heavens thundered 
from their great purple lips as rage ran red 
into their howling eyes and words which,
hoarse with prophecy and admonition, 
showered a blistering conflagration
upon our people’s slackened practices
to make their strongest argument
for the glories of a hasty crucifixion.

This one, they tell me, though,
was of a milder temperament than most.
I wouldn’t know. He was up and gone
before the shapes and colors 
of my blinking world returned.

A reticent master of the cautionary tale, 
you had to cup your hand around your ear
to hear him speak, they say, so softly blandishing
was his rhetoric.  But if you listened closely,
this latest Jesus (the third of that name 
to visit our neighborhood in the space of two years) 
claimed special kinship with the Most-High, 
and crowned himself the bringer of a leaner law.
Surrounded by his publicists
and burly crowd-control specialists,
he was determined to make his mark 
of meekness in a crowded field 
of ill-tempered oracles here below
and an even greater gaggle 
of noisy, jealous deities out yonder.

He needed something splashy, 
this shy purveyance of glad tidings,
and I was that place, it seems,
where preparation met
with opportunity. 

And so here I sit again
upon the porch of my eternity,
a softly breathing masterpiece of taxidermy
for every passerby to ogle at, 
the inconvenient marvel of our village,
a livid carcass snatched from sleep,
the unvanished, the undisappearing
nebbish at the bosom 
of my wary family.

Now I only wonder what the future holds, 
what a future even means here,
as the sweet odors of thyme and cedar cling
to my sallow, apprehensive flesh,
and as the noonday sun warms 
the winter wheat and glazes shiny brown 
the faces of our village children 
pronking in the street,
but cannot drive the chill 
from these charnelled bones of mine 
or warm the cave-dark hollow of my cheek, 
now, as the kinsmen creep wide-eyed, 
stealthy on their shy unsandaled soles 
into my room at every new day’s breaking light
and gently press this fearful crackling skin 
as if to test the doneness 
of a fish upon the coals.

The Science

Mortality is fundamental to the proliferation of life: to diversity, variability, species adaptation, and the capacity of organisms to find niches in the always changing “fitness landscape” of their surroundings.  Each generation of creatures must give way to its successors, whose variations will include members better suited to survival than their predecessors until conditions introduce new challenges. But the human creature desperately seeks stability, desperately fears death, and hopes to elude the individual mortality that is essential to biological sustainability through adaptation. The increasingly dramatic advances of medical science and treatment, and the increasing manipulability of genetic material, have substantially increased life expectancy and promise to deliver us a god-like ability to regenerate limbs, organs, eventually even lives, thereby defying senescence and the limited span of our “natural” existences.

But what would life for the human look like under such conditions, upon removal of the “threat” of death?  What would time mean, past and future, in the experience of the individual?  Inspired by the imagined plight of the biblical Lazarus, this poem speculates on the kind of living, deprived of specificity and finality, that would appear to await us all under such circumstances, outside all we know as “nature,” a species of absolute solitude, a kind of half-life, abandoned to eternity.  And, most urgently, how will humanity negotiate the gap, in this fast-arriving future, between capability and practice? Between what we are able to do and what we choose to do?  And who will decide? which upstart god? ...what rough beast,  /  Its hour come round at last,  /  Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

The Poet

DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. Born in California, he was raised in Japan and Mexico, was educated at the Universities of California and Padova, Italy, and earned postgraduate degrees at Princeton and Yale. After a long career in business and the sciences, he has returned to an early avocation in poems. His first collection, Tarantula Season, is due for release in 2023.

Next poem: They Live Twice by Meg Freer