WWJB

he might be an emergency worker in Bahrain
locked up in an overcrowded cell
for many years to come
for having rescued victims of governmental repression,
shot by American-trained police
with American-made weapons
but never getting mentioned on American-made TV.

or perhaps an orphaned girl in Haiti
sprouting up like a weed,
except for where her arms used to be,
who still walks around and wonders
why nothing is fixed yet
after all those NGOs
availed themselves of photo opportunities,
and when President Aristide
will finally be allowed by the Americans
to lead the country that elected him.

or a pot smoker of color
caught with half an ounce,
rotting in the US prison assembly line
built by its burgeoning drug obsession,
that misses the far worse problem of alcohol
and blinds itself to almost all of the users
who happen to possess pale skin,
as it provides the weapons
that wiped out half of Mexico.

she could be a battered and bartered woman
who finally stood up to her oppressor
and is wasting away in solitary confinement
for the crime of defending herself
and her child
while being black.

or a future mother in Uganda
being raped by a child soldier,
one of the lost legions of forsaken youth
in the ultimate pay of the corporate elite
and sheltered from censor,
since Paul Kagame is such a friend
to the agents of empire
while the coffers are overflowing
and the coffins so dispensable.

or else an emaciated skeleton
desiccating in a desolate desert
in pitiless and wasted Arizona,
still holding out his slender thumb,
or rising from the bottom
of the murky Mediterranean,
bobbing against uncounted companions,
somewhere south of Italy.

perhaps he's one of the indecipherable smudges
staining the marble steps of some temple
in Hiroshima or Nagasaki,
a dab of color telling a story
that cannot be fully grasped
or comprehensibly forgiven.

his features might be distorted,
lost amongst the gruesome crop of strange fruit
that swayed silently back and forth
as it hung from a southern gospel oak.

or he could be tied up with Matthew Shepard
on a forgotten fence in the American west.

or simply a man at the end of his rope,
dangling beyond his last relinquished hopes,
one of the gathering of abandoned souls
who form the nameless and indigent congregation
of a dingy downtown church.

if the man known to the world as Jesus,
who came to fame fighting the establishment,
and based his unrivaled reputation
on unstinting love for outcasts,
and solidarity with the poor,
was to grace the earth with his presence
in these modern, miraculous times,
i can't help but wonder just who he might turn out to be.