Ezekiel’s Call

The plastic tube drapes over your arm
and drops out of sight.
You watch as the blood, Rich, dark
and red with oxygen flows down,
disappears, leaves you, never to return,
to become a part of another’s body,
to preserve another’s soul.

Your heart pumps, unaware at first
of the slow drain of life,
trusting strange nurses to allow just enough
to leave your veins,
just enough,
and no more, somehow knowing

just how much can drain and then,
replenish,
trusting

hat the draining, unlike that of the soul,
will not continue into oblivion,
leaving you desiccated, dry as bones,
waiting for Ezekiel’s call.

About this poem

I took the picture above some time ago, thinking to myself that someday I’d like to write a poem about giving blood. That poem just showed up.

The story of Ezekial and the dry bones is one of the most dramatic, and one of my favorite stories in the entire bible.  If you would like to understand the reference, you can read it in Ezekiel 37: 1-14. It is a great story of what God’s spirit can do to a dead soul. It’s also a scene that has been tapped in films from the fifties all the way to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

Tom