indifferent to fleas,
without moral responsibilities
if God is a wad of liberal thinking
in a transient Jewish carpenter’s mind.
Psalm 9 (b)
the Lord shall endure forever
Could God die?—but there is no subjunctive
for God and death except for Nazareth.
Take that moment, then: Pontius Pilate lives
but all meaning has exhaled its last breath.
Now what? Pretend nothing happens reversing
the disappointment—no resurrection
and no Amazing Grace: sheer mere perversion
of everything worth claiming, perfection
of imperfectability. Now we
climb our minds like cats; we grow long white beards;
we shoulder the writhing wild cross of Why;
we say, To hell with it all, one more beer
for the Empire. What a nightmare, what a danger,
what a goblin gurgling in a manger.
Psalm 9 (c)
let not man prevail . . . that the nations may know themselves to be but men.
If You hear all things, then what do You hear:
stretched stiff in rags in graves, their prayers all said,
are their old words living words, the lost poor,
the liquidated, eradicated
mothers, fathers, children burned up in wars;
are they still preying on Your sacred head
alive? When one child loses attention
and is left there, is raped or given a gun
or preached to, coughing, in a long alley—
do You finally have a heart and listen, then?
Will You do something—terrible—finally?—
so nations know themselves to be but men?
Ps. 9 (d)
The needy shall not always be forgotten: the expectation of the poor shall not perish for ever.
Calin
1
A quiet, gentle boy, he always was,
and small; the dark eyes of a dying deer.
“What would you do with a million dollars?”
we asked him when he was ten—some fifteen years
ago. He smiled. “I would buy potatoes!”
He lifted up a board and pointed down:
there was a two-foot space under the floor.
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