Tess Lockhart
  • God Poetry
    • A Preacher's Prayer
    • Advent
    • Advent Watch
    • Ordinary Advent Time
    • First Christmas Post Husband Mortem
    • Christmas Bread
    • Ding Dong Dung
    • Christmas Credo
    • Incarnation Narrative
    • Starlings in Epiphany Snow
    • Evensong in Bleak Midwinter
    • Imposition of Ashes
    • Lenten Ruth
    • Langston Hughes on Maundy Thursday
    • Maundy Thursday's Scattering
    • Good Friday Tenebrae
    • Gardening Holy Saturday
    • Mourning, Holy Saturday
    • A Little Hilaritas What If
    • Milton on Easter Monday
    • Pentecost Invitation
    • For All the Saints
    • Winter Solstice
    • Evening Prayer for the Beloved
    • Incarnation's Repair
    • The News Was Not Good
    • Just Jump Already
    • Job's Modern Lament
    • Uncle!
    • Worship
    • St. Valentine
    • Response to a Dr.'s Rhetorical Question
    • A Prayer of Praise
    • Renunciation and Adherence
  • Marriage Poetry
    • A River of Words
    • Beloved Baptism
    • Anniversary Gift
    • Aching Pain
    • Disappointment for Nothing
    • A Lament of Recognition
    • A Marital Parable Revealed
    • Kissing Death
    • Grief
    • Extinguished
    • Not Exactly Thecla
    • Rectify
    • Love Beyond Terror
    • St. Valentine
    • Divorce
    • Marital Haiku
    • A Mockingbird
    • All for Love
    • Love's Transubstantiation
    • Enough of Love's Ideal Poems
    • My Lie
  • Healing Poetry
    • A Child Abuse Victim
    • At Grandma's Funeral
    • Confronting Nothing
    • For Want of a Ritual
    • Gardening Widow's Weeds
    • Ghost Whisperer Grief Obsession
    • Grief Drought
    • Swimming with Grief's Fear
    • Five Years Post Mortem
    • Middle-Aged Dating
    • Fire and Water
    • Canoe Wrecked
    • Desire Beyond Reason
    • A Survivor's Haiku
    • Baptismal Renewal
    • Of Children, Pigs, and Priests
    • Sometimes
    • The Trickiness of Doors
    • Tenured Otherwise
    • Turtle Soup
  • Quotidian Poetry
    • Cookies for Dragons
    • Leaving My Daughter at College
    • To Mom on Her Birthday
    • On the Third Day
    • Ode to Bermuda Grass
    • Mundane Revelation
    • Sorry White People
    • Truculent Ode to Poetry
    • Twisted
    • DeFuniak Springs
Picture

Maundy Thursday's Scattering

To trick the devouring wolf
the shepherd smears himself
in the blood of branded sheep
attacked earlier by wolves
so that the predator comes for him.
Thus diverted, the wolf
meets raging shepherd’s crook
while lambs scamper safely away. 


Among wolves so goes the Good Shepherd
in solidarity-sheep’s clothing,
stripped and dressed as Passover lamb
thrown to military pack of snarling rage
so that all humanity’s lost sheep 
can scamper safe into the arms of God
bleeding out love, branding all  
with a cross, “Beloved.”


                       ©2009, Tess Lockhart.  All rights reserved.



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