A cruel story

 

Haiku to disturb and reassure

Sarah the jealous,

 

feels threatened by her rival;

 

slave woman, Hagar.

Hagar’s Ishmael

 

is Abraham’s first-born son,

 

fruit of agéd loins.

Sarah’s son, Isaac,

 

shall remain the only heir;

 

Ishmael must go!

 

 

A cruel story:

 

even God is complicit.

 

The child is dismissed.

 

 

Dismissed with water,

 

bread. The water gone, the child

 

is laid in the shade.

 

 

Ishmael’s mother

 

calls to God: Don’t make me watch

 

as death takes my son!

God sends an angel.

 

Do not weep or be afraid

 

God hears the child’s cries.

 

 

Take your son, I’ll make

 

him a great nation. Look, see;

 

I give you water!

The promise was kept.

 

God blessed him as he grew strong

 

in the wilderness.

© Ken Rookes 2023

Misogynist

 

The literalists pedal frantically backwards
with explanatory excuses,
but fail to justify the misogynist cruelty
of the Hagar story.
The great Patriarch’s wife is portrayed
as complicit in the abuse,
even the initiator;
it compounds the betrayal.

The girl is a slave,
property of an aged and desperate couple.
She is a foreigner,
with none to look out for her interests.
Her body is not her own,
nor her fertility;
it is theirs to do what they like,
and they do.

Hagar gives birth to the child of hope,
and then, when circumstances change,
out of jealousy and fear they cast the girl aside;
her child too, driven out into the wilderness.
Somehow they survive.
The Patriarch’s god, we are told,
tacitly approves of the ill-treatment,
having promised to fix things up in the end.

Not one of his better moments.


© Ken Rookes 2014