Do You Want to Be Well?

Written By Laura Reece Hogan

he asks. Seems like a simple question

the man lies in a roughshod portico in Jerusalem
at the edge of the healing pool of Bethesda,
sick for thirty-eight years.

Was the inquiry ironic? Emphasis on want?

Can you blame the man for being
a little defensive, maybe you

or I also would start telling Jesus about how

we do not have,
how no one helps,
how we cannot move,
how everybody else
gets there first.
See this paralyzing
weight of flesh,
these problems,
these people, 
rooting me motionless
even in the presence
of the divine cure.

But then that pointed question reduces
cuts through the noise,
brings

the excuses boomeranging home:
Do you want to be well?

Laura Reece Hogan

Laura Reece Hogan is the author of Litany of Flights (Paraclete Press, 2020), winner of the Paraclete Poetry Prize, the chapbook O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line Press), and the nonfiction book I Live, No Longer I (Wipf & Stock). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, she is one of ten poets featured in the anthology In a Strange Land (Cascade Books). Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in America, The Christian Century, Scientific American, Spiritus, Rust + Moth and other publications.

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