One Monday

There was a pair of crutches in the alley outside the bar as we left poetry slam, propped up against the brick back wall of the place, and we took a moment as we passed to wonder how they might have gotten there.

Crutches, we agreed, weren’t the sort of thing that were easily forgotten. If you had them it was because you needed them, and without need you had none to lose. So, we pondered, how came they to be abandoned so?

Though obviously we didn’t phrase it like that. Poetry slam or not, nobody talks like that in real life.

Perhaps we ought.

Turning the matter over in my mind on the drive back home, I couldn’t shake the image, a man on crutches, hobbling through a darkened alley, when from the shadow comes a stranger with kind eyes and a wizened, wrinkled face. The stranger smiles, placing a hand along side the man’s face, drawing him in close, a mouth to an ear, the whispered word “Heal” and then back into the shadows without even offering a name.

And in this way the Jesus of the Wine Bar works his miracle, crutches fall to the ground and the man walks forward into his life, healed and whole once more.

It’s a beautiful thought…

…more likely, he was on crutches already when the car hit him, and in the confusion the paramedics didn’t notice to bring them along.

But that’s kind of a downer.

I like my version better.