How To Love Your Enemy
by Sam Silva

Neither rich nor poor
nor healed nor lame
nor blind nor seeing
in the tepid game
the absence of such miracles
as might cure a fool or win a friend.

Out of love for Jesus, and
in honor of the crucified
they called the spoiled and snotty child
mortally responsible
for such a game of suicide
whose thin rope
snapped his mother's will.

For they, being much like God himself,
in what to punish, what forgive
...divine in what to spare or kill
and mercifully inclined that way
...a day a year a little while,

had laws that gave the child his due,
and evil dreams a chance to live,
albeit in footsteps following hell.

The nightmares of a little elf,
unconscious of his evil will
and stumbling through another day
where charity and Santa Clause
grow lurid on the great TV

made to uphold all God's laws
...the laws of wealth and freedom
made perfect
in their image and against a sea of poverty

...but not for "him nor me nor you"
but for that figure on a distant cloud
who smites in the name of Jesus
branded
when the world comes to an end
in the minds
and on the right-hand
of the chosen, the victorious, and the proud!