Guest Author

Aliki Barnstone - Poet, Translator, Critic, Editor, English Professor

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With God in the Morning

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I can’t go back to sleep,

so I weep, listening

for a rhyme.

 

For example, the morning dove sighs deep in my backyard.

She doesn’t sing.

The Jehovah’s witnesses rap at my door. They don’t ring

 

my bell, in whose metal the word “peace” is cast.

How sweet are these witnesses, who stand at my threshold

and do not pass through, who honor you with formal dress,

 

expectant, smiling, their leaflets and Bibles held to their hearts.

They apologize for waking me,

though their mission is to wake me,

 

and leave me

with a little flier about why to read your word.

They promise to return, just as you did.

 

They know your name is Jehovah, but I wonder

if you are a supernova contained

in each letter of scripture

 

or are you my Casanova, wandering across the globe,

entering so many souls with your flesh and blood,

pouring your light into their mouths with a kiss.

 

I make coffee because I will not sleep.

How can it be that I am not unique?

How can it be that I am what I am

 

just like them, who know the answers so well?

And now—Holy Christ­!--the phone rings as if to answer

my disbelief in answers.

 

National Geographic offers me a free satellite map,

a gift I can keep, if only I will give a chance

to a DVD of their highlights through the decades.

 

A map from space!

Could the charted world make me

a way to travel to you?

 

Would you take me

in your arms again and again

would we ascend to heavenly realms?

 

I tell the woman reading from her script

that I don’t think I will accept her gift

and my ridiculous voice cracks

 

at the thought that I might have told your witnesses

the same, just as I beg now for forgiveness

and ask, please don’t call again.

 

That’s okay. You’re okay, she says, blessing me in her way.

Have a good day.

And then, dear God, I hang up the phone.

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From Dear God, Dear Dr. Heartbreak: New and Selected Poems

(The Sheep Meadow Press, 2009)

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Biography and Poems

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