The Prosperity Gospels

photo by Oleksii Sidorov

“If your son asked for bread, would you give him 
    a stone?” a televangelist, in front of a ten-foot-wide,

gold rotating globe, the curls of his gelled hair          
    held firm as the waves of the Red Sea, implores 

his congregation and the viewers at home, 
    not, he insists, for their money, but instead,

in an arena no less in size than the Roman Colosseum, 
    for their abundance, the camera searching 

the crowd at the word, finding even the faces 
    of those who seem unsure, their lives 

resembling, in most ways, my own, I imagine
    from the downstairs couch of my split-level home, 

a spot less than a pinprick on the curve of the earth,   
    less than the breath of my infant daughter asleep 

in my arms, her mother and sisters dozing upstairs, 
    our home’s only light the television’s glow that frames 

both me and our newest born, a home full of children 
    asleep being more quiet than an empty house,

a comedian once said, the quietude, I believe, 
    that Christ often sought, at least the Christ who seems 

most human to me, who requested a boat for relief 
    from the crowds and grew tired the way all people tire, 

who said, the poor you will always have with you,
    but you will not always have me, a perplexing statement 

to be sure, at least more so than the first shall be last, 
    and the last shall be first, the virtue all parents attempt 

to instill, though, I admit, with middling success, 
    my own children still lurching for bread at dinner 

each night, litigating their allotments in this and all things, 
    which is perhaps why the evangelist says abundance

again to the crowd’s applause, the word held 
    like the Host itself on their lips as the news program 

cuts to the more-recent past and a clip of flooding
    in the evangelist’s town, a journalist wading 

through water waist deep to speak to the homeless 
    displaced by the storm, behind them the empty arena 

sealed tight as a tomb, cordoned off from those
    in need in exactly the way I feared most as a child, 

that the heart, on a whim, could be hardened to stone,
    whether King or Pharaoh, my loved ones, or me.