Psalms for Skeptics. Kent Gramm
The counter-argument is obvious:
What the hell? What are you talking about?
What does what you want have to do with trust?
What does cheddar cheese have to do with doubt?
For surely doubt is trust. If vigilance
is doubt, then let us man the battlements,
because there is no God to fall back on—
only the unknown lover in the chance.
If you can trust the Lord enough to doubt,
unafraid of a God of certainty,
unafraid of all but living without
the intimate within, then—but we’ll see.
The angels give up faith for certainty—
or do they wonder, where we only see?
The Lord can take away this suffering—
or so the Bible says. The praying pagans
of all ages have stayed awake for pay,
afraid to not pray, waiting for something:
and many are answered; there is no question.
This should not be. The Lord’s Prayer said simply
for the Lord—a voice crying out dimly
articulate in a nightmare, the best
one can do in sleep—that should be just right.
Or why not pray for fun, just the sheer fun,
of careful, spider-like composition?
What can you get from listening at night
but the terror of horses on the road,
slowly walking, clop-clopping: growing old.
To wait and listen while you die is prayer,
“trusting in the Lord.” There are other prayers;
the others work sometimes and this one doesn’t.
(Resigned indifference and tired despair
work. Demons work.) This one’s the most unpleasant
until you die beforehand, before death:
until you trust like a stone. That should be
the best: God praying, the Holy Ghost’s breath
breathing through me, me exactly nowhere
but here, attentive as a cup of tea.
The breath assumes a focus of the air—
each awake in the other, I and she—
awakening forever in the prayer,
the birth and circle of unending prayer.
Psalm 114
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.
Psalm 115
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands.
Please, I need a sweet deal, want something real,
an automobile I can feel, steel wheels
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