Читать книгу Psalms for Skeptics - Kent Gramm - Страница 16

who humbleth himself

He suffered with us.

The Trajan statue

in Ankara still overbears; you look

up, and the face hardly looks down at you.

The muscular breastplate is a stone book

and you can’t read it. You couldn’t lift it.

This emperor could make Greek gods obey,

so did Rome mean power; so he became

a god indeed and is a god today:

a god is power in the very name.

Rome is stone on stone; its letters are stones

the size of capitols. Kneel, then go about

your business; make roads.

When God was alone

under the Romans, reciting his doubt,

he died on his wood; we felt them lift it.

Judah was his sanctuary

If God did go with them out of Egypt,

made a holy habitation in them—

but that is what the Germans call verruekt,

the Gott mit uns mistake that looks the same

from any victim’s point of view—the Jews,’

the Poles,’ the Canaanites,’ the Mexicans’;

but if, I say, their victim wasn’t you,

you might believe it, and it would be news:

our Gentile God consorting with the Jews.

But they weren’t Jewish yet. They were nothing

but slaves on the run under malediction,

old spirituals, old Negro psalms to sing,

mixing up like blood their facts and fictions,

arguing their way to crucifixion.

Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord.

The Lord is not inside the iron core

of Earth, bubbling and spongy like crushed blood;

not in the soiled crystal of thunder clouds

drawing water up from our punished shores;

nor the hired mountains, these mighty purple

blah blah shifting wrinkles on the world’s face;

nor in the rivers’ everlasting race

into the relatively-speaking All

of oceans puny in cosmic warp and yaw;

nor is the Lord in the still small voice

of conscience, prophecy, of assembled

worshippers, of scriptures, properties, law,

or the rat-trap psychology of choice—

but in heaven-spent surrender. Tremble—

What aileth thee, O thou sea . . . ?

What aileth thee, O sea; what sinks in you

like cold? What thin black fingers draw across

the reeds of your slackening longitudes

like fate? What do you vomit on your shores

like ink in glistening burls, your dull words

moaned thick from the pit of your poets’ nightmares?

Do unfathomed dead mock digestion, hurled

from tide to tide with algae in their hair?

Surely you are greater than rotten men,

O sea—those bloated floats of flesh drooling

and defecating in their inventions

while the revolving moon makes you her fool

and the superstitious, globe-eyed squid

gulp globs of glutton-pumped oil like jugs of Id.