Dinner

I would like to have dinner with the man
who didn’t follow Christ, the one who,
when Jesus said: Follow me and I
will make you fishers of men, decided
to go fishing instead, getting in his boat,
pushing out from shore, his nets clean
and repaired, thinking I will have to work
even harder now in order to feed
everyone left behind. I would like
to sit on the beach with him
in front of a careful fire,
his wife and children asleep,
sharing a glass of wine, both of us
telling stories about what we’d done
with our lives, the ones we caught,
the ones that got away.

~ ~ Patrick Lane

From: "The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane (Harbour Publishing, 2011).  
With permission.