The National Poetry Review
Peter Munro
ON GUNS AND BUTTER AND PORNOGRAPHY AND LARD
And again I say to you: It is easier for a camel to pass
through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter
into the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 24:19
A rich man can piss through the eye of a needle
more easily than a camel may palaver
with God. A shipping industrialist waddles
through the gates of glory, his cargo delivered
to cherubs who tap tablets as if chopped liver
scans to bills of lading. The camel skedaddles.
Our rich man saunters home. He strops his meat cleaver.
His e-mail yields up invoices for his diddles.
Slashing budgets, our needy drover remodels
camels by brisket and loin. A red hot lover
runs his credit line for a signature doodled
in the book of ledgers by which our believer
protests injustice, reloading his revolver
with the butter he’d paid his lawyer to wheedle.
PETER MUNRO is a former fisheries scientist who worked in the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and Seattle. Now Munro is an MFA candidate at the University of Washington. Munro’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in such journals as Poetry, the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Iowa Review, Barrow Street, the Birmingham Poetry Review, Rattle, Fugue, the Coal Hill Review, and Poetry Northwest. Listen to more poems at http://www.munropoetry.com.
The National Poetry Review 