December Psalm
☙ ❧

Posted in Poetry • August 20, 2022

Author's Note: I am currently uploading some of my old writing while I get the site set up. I originally wrote this poem in 2010 in a creative writing course and published it in a small online literary magazine that no longer exists. The monotheistic language I used in this poem isn't really my favorite way of talking about the Divine these days, but I still like what I did with it here.

I would not bind the word of God in pages,
but let it scrawl itself haphazardly
across the faces of the aged, aching
men whose lives were sacrificed to toil.
I'd let the creases on their skin spell out
each verse. And I would let the Word inscribe
itself on rocks whose crevices had drunk
too deeply of the rain, and, freezing, had
swollen, fracturing the rigid stone.
The alphabet of God is one of endings,
for any god who would dare to create
must first destroy; each moment kills the one
that came before it. Every birth contains
the atoms of a thousand prior deaths.