Sufficient Poem by Seamus O' Brian

my heart was carried alone
into this world walled off
by the malleable flesh
that would set into various
increasingly capacious versions
of me—walled off
from a particular species of love
which would both expel it
and receive it and in various
degrees of unresponsible innocence
and reasonable acts of omission
bear witness as
the rapiers of life plunged through
the negligibly defensible walls of flesh
to strike the beating core of myself
with sufficient force and frequency
to kill what I might have otherwise
been.

Moses wriggling in his frail willow basket
found not by a princess but by the spears
of the guards who drew courage and strength
from the destruction of the weak and unfamiliar,
an infant birthed from the amnion of the Nile not as
a hero but as a miscarriage heaved to the shore.
But even as the laughter and derision folded
into the whispering chafe of the river-marching reeds,
the arms of the Nile gathered up the boy, and took
his child-wrapped heart back to her onyx-splayed depths.

Monuments rose, flood plains filled and receded, and
when the final shaft of the Archer fell, the blue lotus
flowered and a man emerged from the river's vault,
neither champion nor deliverer, just a simple man
endowed with the gift to navigate the currents
of heaven and hell, bestowed with the strength
and agility to walk the heights of Olympus;
carrying within a heart sufficiently pierced
to hear the whispers of God.