where I once walked

intoxicated

with thoughts of You—

there in one corner stands

an asylum for lepers.

In the other corner near the sea,

a centre for the mentally retarded.

And in the middle,

the faithful greet You

with bold worship.

Fishermen and washermen

feed Your priests.

Their hungry children

are taken from school.

A few landowners

lord over

Your dwelling

and many weep

of their doings

in their own humble abodes.

And that man,

once Your priest,

having a human heart to love

a widowed mother in lonely distress,

now walks discarded,

drinking among drunkards:

a scandal to Your faithful

friendless, embittered, lost.

No Faith, no Hope, no Charity

to save him.

Yes, what a distance for me

from those intimacies—

intense in their genuineness,

beautiful in their innocence—

those that I love to remember

as my own past

but am unwilling

to repeat.

What a distance

between us!

True, I have grown

comfortable.

Yet in my comfort

I am uncomfortable.

The inheritance I sought

was not to become unequal

as Abel over Cain,

but to share your world in uncommon love

for common need,

as among brothers

fathered by one and the same.