Some people arrived, bringing to him a man who was paralyzed, carried by four men. Since they were unable to bring him near Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above him and then lowered the bed on which the paralyzed man was lying.
—Mark 2:3-4
I’ve pulled down dead trees, battled
their stubborn weight by leaning back into my own,
the rope burning my palms, old callouses
fraying, new blisters forming, my thumb wincing
like a balloon at its impending bursting.
And with my brothers, I’ve shouldered our family’s dead,
stagger-marched up the steep cemetery sidehill,
knowing faltering was not an option,
the coffin drumming a pressure on my wrist
that echoed hours after we left the grave.
But had I been one of the four, it’s the height,
not the labor, I would have struggled with,
as I did today while cleaning out our gutters,
the fear I have not and will not conquer
causing me to cling suddenly to our skylight’s frame
as if it were a raft against falling. I looked down
into our living room through the sap-glossed glass,
and as the vertigo swelled then ebbed,
I remembered how the men who unroofed the roof,
dug through thatch to help their friend
and ended up with a bird’s-eye view of God.
As they watched the cure, did their backs
cease spasming? Did the barbed lightning
in their elbows mellow? Did their cramped hands
melt from rigid to limber? No doubt
their pains were, if not also healed,
then overwhelmed by simple joy or stunned
by a belief confirmed. And if afterward,
one of them still trembled in his unconfessed fear
of even the most modest heights, I know
completing the slow climb down the giddy ladder
that quivered with the crowd’s cheers
must have felt like a mundane but private miracle,
a small, growing gratitude for the task to be over,
for the ground under him to be steady and there.
–
James Davis May is the author of three poetry collections, including My Lost Saints, which will be published in the spring of 2027. He grew up in Pittsburgh and now lives in Macon, Georgia, where he directs the creative writing program at Mercer University.