after all homeless
have reason to cry – everything
pointed against them
At the highway woods I took one good look to make sure no cruisers were up or down the road and I dove right in the woods.
It was a lot of dry thickets I had to crash through, I didn’t want to bother finding the Boy Scout trail.
I aimed straight for the golden sands of the riverbottom I could see up ahead.
Over the thickets ran the highway bridge, no one could see me unless they stopped and got out to stare down.
Like a criminal I crashed through bright brittle thickets and came out sweating and stomped ankle deep in streams and then when I found a nice opening in a kind of bamboo grove I hesitated to light a fire till dusk when no one’d see my small smoke, and make sure to keep it low embers.
I spread my poncho and sleeping bag out on some dry rackety grove-bottom leaves and bamboo splitjoints.
Yellow aspens filled the afternoon air with gold smoke and made my eyes quiver.
It was a nice spot except for the roar of trucks on the river bridge.
My head cold and sinus were bad and I stood on my head five minutes.
I laughed. “What would people think if they saw me?”
But it wasn’t funny, I felt rather sad, in fact real sad, like the night before in that horrible fog wire-fence country in industrial L.A., when in fact I’d cried a little.
After all a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.
From The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, The Viking Press, 1958.
In the Bible we read, If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? (1 John 3:17).
According to Wikipedia, The First Epistle of John is the first of the Johannine epistles of the New Testament, and the fourth of the catholic epistles. There is no scholarly consensus as to the authorship of the Johannine works. The author of the First Epistle is termed John the Evangelist, who most modern scholars believe is not the same as John the Apostle. Most scholars believe the three Johannine epistles have the same author, but there is no consensus if this was also the author of the Gospel of John.
Then Wikipedia states: This epistle was probably written in Ephesus between 95 and 110 AD.
If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? was written almost 2000 years ago.
Mr. Kerouac wrote, After all a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him 66 years ago.
Seems like some part of the message is still not getting through.
As I asked the other day, where are we in our moral decision making?
No Haiku For You 