Bartimaeus

An7 Excerpt from The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord

This week and next week for Poetry Aloud, we’re going to be featuring dramatic monologues from my book-length poem, The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord — a poem made up of 100 poems, all centering on the time of Christ’s life and the age of the apostles afterwards. The poem today is “Bartimaeus,” spoken by the blind man whom Jesus healed, as he thinks back upon that day, and not just as one day, either, as you’ll see. He moves from one day of creation to the next, in each of seven parts, and in each part he tells also what it was like before he saw, or what it’s like now, or what happened on that day when he cried, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”