You are Jehovah, and I am a wanderer.
Who should have mercy on a wanderer
if not Jehovah? You create and I decay.
Who should have mercy on the decayed
if not the creator? You are the Judge
and I the guilty Who should have mercy
on the guilty if not the Judge? You are All
and I am a particle. Who should have mercy
I Amidah
Hear my personal prayer, the words of my mouth and the meditation
of my heart that I may find a way back through love
In the hospital roompacked in blood-soaked cottonthe new mother lay
animal-exhaustedtechnicians whisked the child awayin the first
hours there was fear O teach me to withhold judgment
Oh, what am I but an engine, shod
With muscle and flesh, by the hand of God,
Speeding on through the dense, dark night,
Guided alone by the soul’ s white light.
Often and often my mad heart tires,
And hates its way with a bitter hate,
And longs to follow its own desires,
And leave the end in the hands of fate.
There’ s teuch sauchs growin’ i’ the Reuch Heuch Hauch.
Like the sauls o’ the damned are they,
And ilk ane yoked in a whirligig
Is birlin’ the lee-lang day.
O we come doon frae oor stormiest moods,
And Licht like a bird i’ the haun’,
But the teuch sauchs there i’ the Reuch Heuch Hauch
As the deil’ s ain hert are thrawn.
I sit with my railroad face and ask God to forgive me
for being a straight line toward the dead
who were buried with their poor clothes
in the Arizona desert of iron borders.
This way of waving to the embers of the past,
not apologzing for carrying torn rosaries inside
my pockets where beads of worry became fossilized
insects whose dry husks I kept since a child.
How many miles to the border
where all the sky there is
exists for the soul alone?
Where the only breathers
breathing are constructed
from some new electricity
and the flowers are made
indestructible, and messages
from the dead arrive like calm
white birds with a gift?
One more night of spiritual
ice and we might all become
birds, green birds frozen
on a black winter branch.
There is a drumming in the shadows
under leaves: a million eight-eyed
spiders on the march.
That we await a blessed hope, & that we will be struck
With great fear, like a baby taken into the night, that every boot,
Every improvised explosive, Talon & Hornet, Molotov
& rubber-coated bullet, every unexploded cluster bomblet,
Every Kevlar & suicide vest & unpiloted drone raining fire
On wedding parties will be burned as fuel in the dark season.
That we will learn the awful hunger of God, the nerve-fraying
Cry of God, the curdy vomit of God, the soiled swaddle of God,
And into the heavens, as on a bright day after rain,
there came the shapes of four creatures,
and they each had the likeness of a man,
and each man had four wings outstretched
and each wing had four eyes emblazoned, wide open,
given to weeping at the worlds they contained:
It was a picture I had after the war.
A bombed English church. I was too young
to know the word English or war,
but I knew the picture.
The ruined city still seemed noble.
The cathedral with its roof blown off
was not less godly. The church was the same
plus rain and sky. Birds flew in and out
of the holes God’ s fist made in the walls.
