Your sons and daughters will prophesy - any

[Pentecost]

He could not know how close they had passed each other by. For the Father seldom graces the earth.

He had come from that dark place – the darkest place of all, that nothing-womb where, he imagines so very long ago, the Father had said ‘let there be everything’, and so it was – to shepherd a blessed flock to their promised land.

And then, he had ascended once again.

The Father seldom graces the earth.

The Son wanders aimlessly.

Far above, the stars eat little pinholes in the blue-black sky, flickering away like so many venerable eyes a-blink. He traces their constellations with his nose and dark eyes, following the horn of a great ram and the spoon of some insatiable fantasy – they navigate him onwards into a wide, open extinction.

Nothing. 

The Son eats nothing willingly, hungrily, drawing further away from the same-silver body of his Mother. That holy altar on which he had been made; where he had grown from a godlike seed, suckled and found comfort in the baby-memories of her choral heartbeat. 

That body, whose eyes had, perhaps, seen something vaguely precious in that Son – for, of course, the Father seldom graces the Mother – and so, she had kept him safe enough to wander now, still clung on to by a sliver of awkward and uneven boyhood.

In the darkness of night, he is dulled. A faint reflection hangs onto his angular hips and chest like a halo of fine light. Snaking up the thin, long curve of his neck are the markings, purple like bruises on soft skin, that tell a story of something forbidden and deceitful. A story carried from ancient tongue to uncaring ears, and so it is long forgotten. 

Tattooed on his flesh as a warning. Or, perhaps, they are simply dead verses.

He comes to stand, alone and contented in it, under the empyrean court of sun-fire and vacuousness where the Father stays, observing the slow blinking of his congregation.