The convert

I saw him in a corner of the day murmuring a prayer.
It was a psalm of his childhood's God.
He told me:
Our thirty-six saints were always milkmen, water carriers.
We believed that the smaller, the holier.
I dreamt of a religion of greatness
Where a man is God.
I lived for years as if I were someone else.
Now I know the only thing which was really mine
Was the immense loneliness.

Background: a Jew, converted to Christianity. He was exiled from the Jewish community and never really accepted in the Christian one. The poem alludes to the thirty-six secret saints of Judaism that sustain life in this world. The brother speaks.