Poetry Friday: "The Journals of Jesus"

Greetings from insomnia land! If I had enough publishing opportunities to waste a title, that might be one I would use for a memoir.

 I did get 5 hours of sleep, but still, it's strange to wake up at 1 a.m. while much of the rest of the Eastern seaboard is either just going to bed or hasn't been asleep long.  It's strange to go to bed at 8, and even stranger to admit that I often struggle to stay awake until 8.

There are advantages to having an extended morning--that sounds so much more lovely than "insomnia" or "wrecked sleep schedule."  I've gotten some writing done!  I even wrote a poem.  I'd been fretting about my lack of poetry writing, even though I've written 2 poems in August.  I wrote a bit more of the short story I've been working on.  I saw that Rattle is asking for persona poems (go here to know more about that call for submissions), so I went through my unpublished poetry folder to find my persona poems.  I realized that I've written fewer of them than I thought, so I briefly played with the idea of transforming some past poems that I wrote in 3rd person to first.

While I wouldn't want to have this sleep schedule permanently, I'm happy for the occasional sleeplessness.

I'm realizing I haven't left myself much time for blogging, so let me post one of those persona poems.   I'm writing in the voice of an unknown follower:

The Journals of Jesus

Atheists will say that Jesus never wrote,
but they would be wrong.
I was there to keep the notebooks.

Jesus loved to write haiku.
He’d leave them scattered about Galilee.
Some lines found their way into the Gospels.
“You are the light of the world.”
“Who do you say that I am?”
Count the syllables.

Jesus kept a journal,
but the scraps of writing blew away.
He shrugged and talked about the wind
blowing where it wished, and his words
moving with the breath.

Jesus wanted to write a longer piece,
but you’d be disappointed
in what he wrote. You come to Jesus
for answers, while Christ
concentrates on questions.

I knew the human brain couldn’t comprehend
Christ’s writing, so I cast it into the sea.
Every so often, I catch a glimpse of the scraps,
moving with the tides, just below the surface.