Depending on whether I’m going or returning, not long before or after my crossings of the mighty, tea-dark Brazos near the Arredondo bridge, I pass what appears to be a Christian church whose name has kerygma in it. 

For a period measurable in years now, I’ve meant to look up what kerygma means. As I spin by on the farm-to-market road, I always reflect that it has a Greek sound to it. This sets off a well-worn rut of reflection induced by the boredom of a familiar route… 

The old saw about something incomprehensible: “It’s Greek to me.” My southern grandfather’s time-stamped joke about one Black schoolboy’s query to another concerning homework: “Is ya didja Greek?” The only son he was that never graduated high school because he wouldn’t pass Latin, according to his mother. The father he was to my teenage mother, jibing her for dating a “jewboy,” son of the Tobolowskys, who owned the dry goods store.

At long last I’ve Googled kerygma, and its meaning is what you’d expect: a bunch of words in English. Something about preaching.

I always end up on ekphrastic, another Hellenism that writhes in and out of my retentive faculty like a slippery fish. It reminds me of a favorite painting of mine from among those I’ve done. 

The painting is narrow and tall. A female figure — girl/woman — stands holding a stunned five-year-old boy — son/brother. They fill the picture space from head to toe.

With the boy balanced on her scrawny hip, she stares skyward with the bleakest of looks, searching for God, maybe, or else the next bomb. Their skin is ashen; the coloring of their clothing filthy, ferrous, feral: mauve, olive, rust, ochre. 

Much as they are the putative subject, the true subject is the rubble of which they are the human pieces. Sturm und Drang; wrack and dreck; profit and loss.

I’ve never painted anything with more devotion than the abstract wreckage, technically a background, which envelopes the walking destined-to-be-killed. It’s an inglorious, ghastly gallimaufry of improvised shapes in gamuts of grisly grays.

Rubble — inky, icky, inevitable — enduring creation of man, background of so-called civilization.

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