Monday, April 26, 2010

Visions

In almost every class we are asked to do what Marylhurst calls a Hermeneutic, or a direct response to the material.  It always catches me off guard, and busy, and grumpy and not feeling like having a 'direct response to the material'.

Every once in while I do something that I like.  Here is a poem that is a 'direct response' to all the shenanigans in Genesis.

Visions

Visions are not what they used to be,
God doesn’t easily walk in gardens.
Adam lives alone and is getting unemployment.
Lambs don’t acquire spots from the clever application of colored rods.

Some things do remain the same,
Rape is still timeless and still about property.

But visions don’t care about changing times, they pulse through in any way they can.

They come to me over radios spewing junk
and then somehow I hit the right band and the Universe speaks.

Power-lines snake past me in my dreams,
They course with life force from some Hooverish source of infinity.

Once I even saw a garden in my mind,
but in the lovely, leafy stillness there also came an earth-moving, scraping, killing machine.
It’s not what you think.
The dozer was telling me
I had a choice in how I see.

I want my visions to spring wet and green from creation like a Hallmark theme -
And God saw that it was Good.
Or, as in one hopeful translation
God saw that it was Beautiful.

Instead they come as they will, using whatever symbol is in the mind’s junk drawer
To tell us we have the power,
if only we would use it,
if only we would see.

1 comment:

excavator said...

like that zen saying that you can read a phone book and find enlightenment?