A DROWNING MAN

At the portals of heaven’s gate, in afterlife

We were told, he asked, why there was no help

He expected the kind of rescue, seen in movies

A chopper hovering with slings to pick him up

A submarine with expert divers to his clarion call

Or to have become a big fish and swam to safety

He did not help himself, so heavens picked him up

A starving man who lost his job for no cause of his

Had no money entirely and so he begged along

He starved with little or no food at all to eat in days

With debit card in hand, he went to an ATM for cash

He was referred, invalid, for it had nothing to give

The lady next on the queue brought him some cash

Thinking it was his own that the machine withheld

Shocked, he counted the bank notes, one to twenty

Then returned, because it was not what he wanted

He couldn’t be pushed to steal in his desperate state

When his friends heard his tempting story told

They laughed at him, called him, a father of fools

You said, you prayed to God before stepping out

That was the help you asked, but you did not see

He stopped a while and looked at them with dismay

With pains of biting hunger, was he really a fool

Like the drowning man and the log of wood at sea

Why didn’t he assist himself with the offer of cash

Put forward, in an error, by a naïve village woman

Lucky, she was, because she met the very wrong man