Stretcher-Bearers

It’s not the healer or the healed
but the latter’s friends, who carried him
to meet the man who’d stirred things up
while mending limbs and casting out
the demons lodged in people’s minds.
But the crowd was dense, the doorway packed
and the only way was through the roof

then carefully to lower him
hoping to catch the guru’s eye.
They asked for nothing for themselves:
they weren’t the problem to be solved.
And yet it was their faith which moved
the guy to come up with a cure –
shocking the strait-laced by first saying

he’d magicked away his patient’s sins.
I suppose that night the gang re-grouped
for a celebratory flask of wine
and then the short years passed until
each one died anyway. We don’t
know their names. They can’t have thought
their act would be remembered two

millennia later.
                           This night, I pray
all who the sick and wounded bear
might even such faceless glory share
as though held in that oddball’s stare

as though the rest of us could care
as though love mattered, everywhere.

Tom Vaughan

If you have any thoughts about this poem,  Tom Vaughan would be pleased to hear them