by Daniel Thomas Moran
This morning in Sevilla,
I signed a book for Jesus.
He was our tour guide as we
traipsed the storied hills
of Gaudi’s Barcelona, and
wandered the sacred, shining
shores of the Costa Del Sol.
I had to make my confession
that, for most of my troubled life,
I have not believed in Jesus or his
blue-draped, long-suffering mother,
never mind his hapless hammer-
swinging father they all called Joe.
I surely could never believe that
Jesus was the son of a god
any more than I might believe
that about myself, even though…
I hope that my dear
wife sees me in that light,
if for no other reason than, in
my worship and praising of her,
I have brought her her morning
coffee, in bed, every single day
for the last three and a score years.
But our Jesus in Spain might
have re-ignited the cold ashes
of my smoldering faith.
He seemed to know my desires,
anticipating my next thought
at nearly every moment.
He even fed us wine and fishes
and, at our very own last supper,
with his nineteen disciples assembled,
anointed our tongues with flan.
This morning, after a night of
dances and strummed Ibérian songs,
Jesus prophesied that the next day
I would find myself sleeping
on a feather bed in Madrid,
only to awaken and be taken
up into the heavens and carried,
after a stopover in Dublin,
across mountains and a vast ocean,
to the ancient brick city of Boston.
And I will be damned!
That is precisely what happened!
Praise Jesus.
Daniel Thomas Moran, born in New York City in 1957, is the author of seventeen collections of poetry. In the Kingdom of Autumn was published by Salmon Poetry in Ireland in 2020, who also published his previous collection, A Shed for Wood, in 2014. His Looking for the Uncertain Past was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2005. His new collection, Five Questions, will be published by Salmon Poetry in early 2026. He has had more than four hundred-fifty poems published in some twenty-five countries. In 2005, he was appointed Poet Laureate by The Legislature of Suffolk County, New York. His collected papers are being archived by The Department of Special Collections at Stony Brook University.
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