Cure

There was no peace:

Wherever he went, they pursued him,

‘My father’s blind’, ‘My child can’t walk’,

‘Deliver us from the madman

Who cries among the tombs’

Lepers hailed him from afar

‘Take pity on us!’ 

Such was his fame 

That one woman trusted 

The very hem of his robe

Would stop her bleeding. 

He cured them all;

The blind, the deaf, the mad and the lame.

But the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

Nor the ear with hearing.

They became nostalgic for their infirmities.

Privation had been a peculiar blessing,

An improvisation around a physical incapacity.

Healing, they realised, was not to be made whole,

But to be set free, to live beyond themselves

Without any idea how. 

They remembered the rabbi;

And went once more to find him out.