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I see now that faith was never the point but only
those failed in faith are fit to speak of it.
He remained at my window, humbled by himself;
a wasp with torn wings clasping the sill's crumbled mortar.
I assumed he'd come to die and decided I would let him.
Each day he turned more from a monk in tattered robes
to a god performing penance for razor mouth and venomous body
though all gods are killers without fault.
For weeks he remained without food or companion so I kept the glass
between us finally to confess: my faith broke with winter; stands now
as a tree, black lines and leafless, a likeness of itself.
Naturally I was devastated by the nest forming beneath him
and watched a good hour as his building betrayed me,
then I doused him to the ground with a pan of dishwater.
Damn you!
But I wanted to say: the harvest of a sparrow's nest,
***
Perhaps the dead long for light, long for the sky and stars.
Why we fold them in boxes, shelve them neatly in rows
six feet beneath a world they lived long enough to die in,
I do not know.
I thought as a child that the hell-bound had it easy,
already down there, not much distance to go.
Those in limbo could rest awhile, stretch their bones
back into the earth and fashion new lives from memory;
live ten thousand lives in dirt and darkness.
But who can help those deserving heaven?
Even the statues turn away; angels with eyes lifted
or heads bent in prayers for the living because soon enough,
our turns will come. They try not to hear the dead who are good
tossing in their graves with desperate talk: Which way is up?
Was that a crow this morning?
Because the good are perfect, they are not tortured by memories
so they forget themselves. They lie with the damned
and those left to wonder, who try to give directions with talk of love
and light, the shortest distance between ground and sky. Remember God?
Those in waiting ask the good who, dumb as dirt, stagger for the answer
to a god too distant to wake the dead.
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Erin Lambert
holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, where she was the 1998 recipient of the Elise G. Mead fellowship in poetry. She now lives in New York City, where she works for International Baccalaureate North America, an organization which, among other endeavors, enables secondary schools around the world to establish a two-year diploma program equivalent to a degree in the liberal arts. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Mudlark (Poster #44), The 2River View, and Fine Madness. She has also completed a manuscript of poems entitled The Unproven.
We like to acknowledge and thank Erin Lambert and Blackbird for allowing us in jehat.com to publish on-line some of her poems .
as those poems published first published by Blackbird.
www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v2n1/poetry/lambert_e/ |
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