he put his hands on people with leprosy outcasts, their scaly wounds noseless faces fingerless hands covered with gunnysacks those he touched, recovered he touched dead bodies too and they lived eating food with their people but the leaders called him an outlaw took him by military hands they whipped him bloody and torn spiking him to a rough crossbeam of wood hanging between the darkened sky and the blood-puddled earth thorn-crowned, he gasped - paid in full and died as the old scrolls said to check for death, the soldiers pierced his side with a spear blood and water poured from the broken pericardium the body put in a merchant's rock-hewn family burial cave a heavy stone to seal the mouth the leaders washed their hands of the troublemaker but the dead man wrapped in a chrysalis like cocoon in layers of seventy pounds of cloth and spices on a cold slab in the mausoleum cave the man walked out just as the old scrolls said a woman came to grieve for him saw the stone off to the side a man outside as the gardener calling her - mary, clearing her eyes overjoyed she cried - rabbi, my teacher mine too that troublemaker 3.5 10/10 © Brian Peter Hodgkinson
Touch By The Troublemaker
14
Apr