Gore with Hope - A Poem from Karsten Piper

I saw this poem linked from Justin Taylor's blog (which is the one blog I check every week day). I'll include John Piper's brief introduction to the poem. JP's whole post is called "Sometimes He Kills Us to Save Us."


"Last November I blogged on my son Karsten Piper's poetry. I celebrated some of his awards and ended by saying "Perhaps we will post a few more of Karsten’s poems in the coming months."Well, now that the winter issue of Rock and Sling: A Journal of Literature, Art, and Faith has appeared I am able to post one of the best poems I have ever read on a Biblical text.
I promise you it is not what you expect.
It’s called “Luke 18.25” and it won the Virginia Brendemuehl Poetry Contest from Rock and Sling."

Luke 18.25by Karsten Piper
~He spread his blanket on the sand, kneeled and arranged his bowls and tools:hook, mallet, clamp, chisel, rasp, razor.

His smile glinted in the rongeur’s claws,and upside down in the curette’s spoon.Light shone out of the needle’s eye.

“Hoosh,” he said and began plucking hairs, paring calluses, shearing wool, shavingto the follicles, cutting to the quick.

He sorted these, trimming skin with skin,hair with hair, into rows of clay bowls,and set a large basin to catch each sour drip

as he sliced the hide and used both fiststo yank back the whole stubbled, gray pelt,as wet and red on its underside as afterbirth.

He piled this heavily away, draping it in clean linen, and turned to the meat and bone heaving under sheer, tight membrane.

Sawteeth chewed into femur, rib and shoulder.Pliers twisted and wrenched away tendonsuntil everything softened, canted, and collapsed—

yet not one sliver dies. Each ribbon and shard bawls for the horror and hurt of their missing,wishing for the old braying wholeness.

Pain bloodies evening and morning, stabbing day after day from even the first cuts, like the slow light of far stars.

Eyeballs and heart float alone in the last bowl, dark and defenseless, quavering when he leans down and they recognize in his eyes how little is left.

“Easy now, Camel,” he says and lifts me in his fingertips, one quivering strand at a time, through the eye of the needle. ~