Читать книгу Psalms for Skeptics - Kent Gramm - Страница 9

they soon forgot his works

The supersized blue star Rigel, sixty

thousand times brighter than the sun, collapses

someday soon: its heated sacrifices—

the nitrogen of sons and daughters stripped

and spread across wide open spaces of waste—

will hollow out its core like a nation

sucking the blood of its poor. Thin marrow

sipped from their bones, they become dry shadows

circling to the bottom of a hand cupped

around a black and blood-stained hole—erupting

to a supernova—flambeau of gas

blue, white, red—wild excess!—its shredding flower

the settling shoulder of Orion’s power.

Heed, ye heathen!—the heavy torch is passed.

they murmured in their tents

They murmured in their tents, some centuries

before they were Jews—just Joe and Susie

Blow in the desert: something anybody

would have done—Arabs, campers, Comanches,

men, women. A tent is made for murmuring—

for a muffled, airy cinnamon breeze

under colored shade, warm afternoon peace—

made for murmuring and for being heard—

murmuring like water, murmuring like

a distant caravan, murmuring like

people lying looking up at the stars;

and who in the world do we think we are

to sleep under these stitches of glittering light?

he is good

The Lord is good, and everything is one.

I can’t believe Nels Mickleson is dead,

so set my memory of him—face red,

alive. What do I care for sunken bones,

stones, or all the comfort under the sun?

Lord, let me see him on his porch again—

the one on Ninth Street—but as he was then

and not in memory. Memory’s done.

The heart’s done. It’s just a matter of time

and it will all be done—everything one:

one old stone in the cold—or in the mind

of Mr. Mickelson, the universe

drawing in like sand down the rounding course

of his life, in that chair, in the sublime.