PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

After hearing, a whole evening, that my hair was still long

(my parents hoped to convince me that this was subversively wrong;

I dared not tell them how the soul-nature in me

rejoiced in desire toward other males---yes!, Homosexuality!---

Ryland's picture of young David, barefoot, stirred this when I was three).

Next day, they went on a furniture shopping spree,

and expected to be gone until dusk or later.

I woke and put on the forbidden mesh tee

along with my baggiest, most distressed, bell-bottom jeans. Having put

my clothes on, I eagerly chose to remain barefoot

(also impermissible in that home, because of how it might look).

Then, even more eagerly, I brought out the borrowed library book

and, outdoors in the grass, I read---for a very long stint---

the distinctly unprotestant Septuagint

(in an English translation), the ancient version compiled by Seventy

scholars at the behest of your Pharaonic majesty

which, more than two millennia forward from that, I acknowledge gratefully.

J-Called