A Love Song for the Less Desirable Woman

You burst yourself upon

a man who drank you down

then threw you aside.

I won't flatter you.

You weren't pretty enough.

It wasn't in your DNA to keep him.

There weren't enough camels in your genetic dowry;

you were Leah with the weak eyes,

scraping together mandrakes

and desperate opportunities

for leverage enough

just to get him in bed

where you could take his

broken heart in both of your hands

and hold it for a few hours like a wounded bird,

sing over his pain

kiss every torn place,

and believe the nurture you gave fully in darkness 

might somehow

overcome the mediocrity of your plain face in the daylight.

You revolved around him like a moon

healed him, made his waves rise and fall by your gravity,

realigned his confidence.

But then the sun rose,

and the spell was broken,

and behold, you were not Rachel.

Men are men are men, see?

And what now? What now?

What has been joined cannot be torn apart.

So you hobble along looking for the Jesus who stirs together hope for the woman caught in adultery, 

the Jesus who heals a flow of blood,

the Jesus who resurrects new life out of the same old lessons women have been learning from men like him for centuries.

It's no help now, 

but for what it's worth,

I never thought his Rachel 

was more beautiful than you.

I still don't.

I think she is the sort who will tire of him in time,

who will leave him like he left you, 

and I don't know if he will see then at last what he has done to you,

or if he will just move on to another pretty face,

looking for another high.

God, save his soul.

But I do see what you gave.

I see what you tried to take.

Sister, have we progressed so much from those primitive days

when women were traded like property?

Now we trade our own selves

like slaves

at a lower exchange rate.

There has to be dignity in us somewhere, Sister, 

no matter what we have been shown.

Even in this mechanized, corporate Christianity 

where pretty faces rise to the top of radio charts,

to winning book deals, 

to speaking gigs for Jesus,

to ring shops and weekend visits,

the regular folks like you and I,

we have to mean something.

Charm is deceitful but successful,

and yet God promises that

beauty fades

while the fear of The Lord

allows the rejected to

stumble somehow 

into the line of the Messiah.