Ruthless

I had a nightmare that the dark fell

and you swept aside the scattered grains

that couldn’t shed their husks like most,

or never quite turned gold or full –

the wind blew, and they landed in the corners and

the chinks, aside the perfect clean gold kernels.

The grains you couldn’t brush away

you spread your cloak across, to mask their pinch,

and lay down mid the full-threshed piles of harvest,

there to guard them

till you took them back like treasure to their place within your home.

And in the night I came, the half-husked girl

who tagged behind the reapers for the discards

and the half-ripes and the remnants no one needed,

the girl who couldn’t seem to give a baby

or a place to that poor family that all died out in Moab,

so instead she gave herself

into the grief of the old woman

and the gleaning in strange fields

and the scattering of the winds – the many kinds of wind.

That night was cold and long, years-long. I laid my gifts down

at your feet and begged. I might not

be pristinely clean or ripe enough to sprout seeds of my own

or even whole, but I could hide beneath your cloak,

maybe be lost among the brightness of the good grains

if you let me. And you thought

and thought

and thought there in the darkness,

staring at the bright-threshed piles of perfect grain. And then

you sent me on my way 

back to the house now full of nothing

but Naomi and our griefs. And scattered 

at your feet I left the remnants of 

my dignity, the half-ripe hopes, discarding of 

another chance at meaning something. You

 took home the golden grains

and brought to them a girl you thought had more to love you with. 

But she gave less. The chaff you brushed off when I left

was all I had. 

Image courtesy of Pixabay