In the Red Corner

 

For years now you’ve been painting yourself 

a luxurious cloak of sheep-colored clothing,

a trick you picked up from your persecutors,

while the other hand dips into the same can

to splash anyone who sniffs at disagreement

with the dreaded name of wolf.

You wave your encrusted brush

with broad, insistent strokes,

pausing only long enough to beat

your breast in gloating over your villanized foe,

painted at last into the corner 

where you wanted him all along.

There was just one hitch: the more 

tightly we were cornered, the more willing 

we became to incur the unbearable cost.

The more we incurred it

the less costly it became,

until, left with two untenable outs, 

we took the one which seemed untakeable 

straight into your waiting martyrdom,

and you learned yet again

that the real tragedy in constantly crying 

wolf is not so much that when he appears

on your doorstep, teeth dark with the blood

of your forefathers, no one will believe you, 

but that you yourself will have summoned him 

with the smell of gory fleece left outside your door.

The whitewash on the floorboards

is turning yellow. The stain

on your hands won’t wash out

no matter how hard you scrub

and you scrub

and you scrub.