Exhortation
by Shane Schick
Exhortation
by Shane Schick
The vandal broke the stained-glass windows
of six other churches besides ours. Which means
he not only felt prepared to cast the first stone,
but must have carried around a bag full of them.
One rock clipped an angel just behind its wings.
Another created a hole in Jesus’s left side,
as though he needed to balance his wounds out.
I checked, but his gentle smile never wavered.
It was not necessarily a hate crime, police insisted.
The holes stared back with an unblinking silence.
I never got to watch the security cam footage
they used to apprehend the culprit days later
but I imagined it, pictured his haggard face
as he stared up, a projectile in his right palm,
and I wondered what kind of extra weight
he was carrying there, whether some prayer
of unspeakable desperation could be hurled
in the middle of the night at the closest thing
to a higher power anyone can actually behold.
What kind of answer he heard in the shattering. Shane Schick has had poetry published in Ekstasis Magazine, The Clayjar Review, Hearts of Flesh, Macrina Magazine and many other publications. He lives with his wife, an Anglican priest, and their children in Whitby, Ont. More: ShaneSchick.com/Poetry.
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