found

midrash qatan* on Luke 15

by Matthew E. Henry

sometimes you must abandon the children,
leave the 23 for the one whose face is melting
in the glass of your classroom door. the one
collapsing in arms which can’t fully connect
around a backpack as her forehead dents your chest,
her keening and tears soaking the front of your shirt.

you can’t worry about the rest. the oblivious,
content sneaking screen time under a desk.
the dutiful, working to compose an essay on how
the shepherd, the woman, the father are not God
(unless they imagine God an incompetent steward
misplacing precious things. they might.).

you can’t worry about the knowing who,
in reverence, remember their own wilderness—
wanderings which once brought them to this
same door. those who avert their eyes, hearing
the sobs and the footsteps away as bittersweet
rejoicing—the lost sought, the cost counted.

sometimes you must act, quickly. but know:
down the hall, the elder scribes and pharisees
will murmur in the faculty lounge.

*midrash qatan (“a little story/exposition”) pays homage to the Rabbinic genre of Midrash Rabbah  (“a great midrash”).

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Dr. Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is the Boston-born author of the full length collections the Colored page (Sundress Publication, 2022) and The Third Renunciation (New York Quarterly Books, 2023), the chapbooks Teaching While Black (Main Street Rag, 2020) and Dust & Ashes (Californios Press, 2020), and the micro-chapbook have you heard the one about…? (Ghost City Press, 2023). He also has a collection forthcoming from Harbor Editions (said the Frog to the scorpion). MEH is editor-in-chief of The Weight Journal, an associate poetry editor at Pidgeonholes, an associate editor at Rise Up Review, and is the 2023 winner of the Solstice Literary Magazine Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize.