Poem: At the Gate

“As you already know, I watched them die: my mother and father, my two brothers, my wife and only child. With that much heartache crammed into the last quarter of my life, who would blame me if I scribbled God’s name on the back of an envelope and buried it under the azaleas between what’s left of my wife’s Siamese cat and my son’s cocker spaniel? But I didn’t,” he said as if scoring points in a long and tedious debate. “I hate to be repetitious but what about faith, what about unconditional love, what about good deeds? Those have been the top three answers since I got here,” Peter replied, raising one eyebrow and then the other. “You seem to have forgotten, your boss has been known for two thousand years as a Man of Sorrows. Hell, doesn’t that name aptly describe me in the final chapter of my life? So, Pedro, are you letting me in or not,” he asked and continued toward the gate....