{Zipporah on Sunday and more}

Yesterday we had our theoretically monthly louderARTS meeting/workshop, and it was all God all the time. No really, it was bizarre. Once all the work-work stuff was done, we headed into workshop mode, and since only Abena and Matthew had actually done the exercises, we took a half hour freewrite based on these three exercises:

OPTION ONE:

write a poem of instruction or command, telling someone specific how to forget you.
_________________________

OPTION TWO:

choose an object, a thing.
(example: a heart)

list at least twelve things it is NOT
(example: a valentine, two-dimensional, broken, green, visible)

list at least twelve things it IS
(example: wet, beating, sacred, four-chambered, talkative, on the table)

list five people affiliated with it
(Jesus, my mother, Joe the guy from the Home Depot)

a place

an action

what you might ask of this object

Option three was a string of words to use in the poem.

Somehow everyone's writing involved religion in some way. Wierd, huh? I mean, mine involved Zipporah and Moses because I'm writing that for a show Abena's directing, but otherwise it's very random.

Anyway, folks came up with some GREAT stuff, even what Matthew insisted was trash held promise until he wrote "jubileeve these prices?" to work in the cue word "jubilee."

Here's what came out of my Sunday. I think there's probably a third poem to round out the series, but maybe that's my bias toward threes.

Zipporah tells Moses to scram

forget how you found us, how my six
sisters ran when the shepherds yelled
that we had no right to the water even if
our father’s flock staggered from the heat,
how they gathered around my shouting
as if thirsty themselves, how you stood
between us, how I hated loving you for that.

forget my father’s offer of me, the bread
at our wedding, how you promised that night
your roamings were over, how I watched
your hands go still on the blanket
and believed you. forget my feet
swelling and my belly swelling
and the nights in the field praying

for a boy, promising any god within earshot
everything. forget that when Gershom was a boy,
and so strong, we knew it was a god of the field
to thank and no blood covenant necessary, but you
went ahead with the cutting, at night, while I slept
exhausted with the birth.

forget how I swore no allegiance to the god
who sent you into the desert, so bone-hungry,
so sick with demands, how when Eliezer
was born I held him all night for weeks
until the time for you to bloody him had passed.

do you forget the lies? that you are
Egyptian by culture but by birth, a Jew?
how we hid that from my father, sure
we’d lose everything, and now this
volatile deity of yours fills this dusty
inn room with lightning, sets
the boys screaming, and I know

it is your blood or Eliezer’s and if only
for the minute you stood between me
and those thirsty men I take the flint knife
to our youngest, touch the skin
to your feet, watch the lightning cease,
surely you are a bridegroom of blood
to me, forget me now, follow
that god to Egypt. I’m going home.


Zipporah calls Moses home

find me, holy with the scent of mourning,
giving away grief like coins. come pliant
and hoping, truce a burning olive branch,
come that obvious and urgent. dusk pulls
across my shoulders, a derelict shawl –
find me here. unlatch the mouth so far shut
from me, loose the jubilee waiting there,
the promise. gather our sons
into your pockets. their chins
carried your defiance
all the way to Midian.

Moses, I am the burning bush. the plagues,
the pharoah’s throat, the Red Sea. I am where
you began before either of us lost our mothers,
before the reeds became our beds, before
your God invented himself.

when I broke you from me, I became the sand,
the staff, the brother who welcomed you
and no place is home now, the boys
will not sleep alone, they refuse to eat
unless facing the door, they are
your feet. they stand in the dust
waiting – we are your people.
set us free.

*

oh, and here's the poem that spawned the second exercise -- even stranger, people hadn't read it before the workshop, and IT TOO is full of religious imagery. louderGOD, anyone?

Sacred Heart
by Lee Briccetti

Even as a girl I knew the heart was not a valentine;
it was wet, like a leopard frog on a lily pad,
had long tube roots

anchoring it in place.
And smaller roots like lupine and marigold
and bleeding hearts' roots I traced with my finger

while transplanting in the garden.
Jesus had a thousand bloody hearts
planted in our flowerbeds beneath pink flowers;

they could see us through the ground.
I had a book about a girl who lived in the earth
near the tree roots, who cut off her finger

and used it as a key. I wondered if I could love like that.
I studied the painting of His chest peeled back
to show light around the Sacred Heart.

And in the bedroom at my grandmother's where I slept
against the trees, I was the spirit
inside the room's heart, my life inside me,

something that could leave through the window quietly.
I heard the fibrous closing and closing
inside my body and prayed to stay alive.


***