Hagar's shoulders sagged from the...
Illustration
Object:
Hagar's shoulders sagged from the burden.
Lightened fearfully by each day's meal.
The empty water bag was no more good
Than a dry snakeskin.
Each step with the boy spun the world,
And even sitting found nothing stable this side of death.
The child's burned eyes and swollen mouth
All looked the same -- red, wrinkled, bleeding.
Upon her last step before placing Ishmael under the bush
Hagar could have posed for a statue of motherhood.
Hopeless love is still love:
Unable to watch her son die,
Unwilling to leave and let him die alone.
And Ishmael -- no symbol to her -- became the world's great tragedy:
Dying at the hands of a religion's princess
Only because he liked to play
And was born to the wrong woman.
The bending of Hagar's back,
The last moving of Ishmael's head off a sharp rock,
Was humanity's lowest point since Eden,
Which only Yahweh-God himself could redeem.
Lightened fearfully by each day's meal.
The empty water bag was no more good
Than a dry snakeskin.
Each step with the boy spun the world,
And even sitting found nothing stable this side of death.
The child's burned eyes and swollen mouth
All looked the same -- red, wrinkled, bleeding.
Upon her last step before placing Ishmael under the bush
Hagar could have posed for a statue of motherhood.
Hopeless love is still love:
Unable to watch her son die,
Unwilling to leave and let him die alone.
And Ishmael -- no symbol to her -- became the world's great tragedy:
Dying at the hands of a religion's princess
Only because he liked to play
And was born to the wrong woman.
The bending of Hagar's back,
The last moving of Ishmael's head off a sharp rock,
Was humanity's lowest point since Eden,
Which only Yahweh-God himself could redeem.
