United States, (b.1946)
FIVE PARABLES
(excerpt)
- 4. Legion of Demons
- The legion of demons and the suicidal swine
- came much later.
- What I recall is simple––just a few words
- and our friend was himself again.
- For months madness
- had overwhelmed him with certainty.
- We weren’t surprised.
- What is madness, after all,
- but certainty about everything?
- And he was already
- inclined in that direction.
- Then he explained
- that he could see by our faces
- who each of us was pretending to be,
- and more often than not he was right.
- After which
- no one wanted to hear
- his prophecies and premonitions—
- neither his wife nor his children,
- who wept for the changes he’d embraced,
- nor his neighbors, who were fearful,
- nor the strangers on the road
- he stopped to exhort, nor the soldiers
- who mocked him.
- He forgave them all, since that was part of his madness.
- And in this way
- life continued, until one of the many
- prophets of those days, passing through
- with his followers,
- paused, and knelt down, and said
- something we couldn’t hear, and our friend
- blinked his eyes in astonishment,
- and was as he had been.
- Later, when word got around
- about the multitude of demons
- he’d been possessed by,
- and the two hundred swine rushing off
- into the sea to escape from that evil,
- there was no doubt
- how much drama this prophet,
- or one of his disciples,
- had added to our lives.
- And why not?
- A savior needs his miracles to be impressive.
- We understood.
- After all, our friend had been restored
- and was again
- like the rest of us,
- a man who knew what we all knew––
- the stuff of day by day,
- world without end, enough to get by.
About the Poet:
Lawrence Raab, United States, (b.1946), is a poet and educator. He earned a BA from Middlebury College and an MA from Syracuse University. He taught at various institutions including American University, the University of Michigan, and Williams College (retired), where he was the Morris Professor of Rhetoric and the Harry C. Payne Professor of Poetry.
Raab is the author of nine collections of poems, including The Life Beside This One (2017), What We Don’t Know About Each Other (1993), which was a winner of the National Poetry Series and Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (2015), which was named as one of the Ten Best Poetry Books of 2015 by The New York Times.
In addition to his poetry, Raab has written the screenplays The Distances (1967) and Or I’ll Come to You (1968). The Birds, his adaptation of a play by Aristophanes, was first produced in 1975. Raab has been an editor for Frontiers. [DES-06/22]