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Three Poems by Melissa Range Elementary Hebrew I: The Vowels There was a time when all we had were roots and stacked upon them, more consonants and they were enough for us to guess at fire, or toil, or ground. But later we wanted more; we asked for vowels. And we were granted vowels through our own hands, which we love for their power. The Name knew what we’d do— for are not our hands part of the movement of glory? So we set one word aside and dredged points for the rest, refining each letter’s slope and ledge, inscribing our throats with the correct sound for contexts clear and precise. We did not foresee that our embellishments would distract us. Now all we catch of light we sense through their dominion. Benign as kings and more to be feared, more golden and bitter than Solomon in all his crumbling majesty, they go before us and behind us and ensure our victory over the mystery at the root and in the marrow. We carry The Name in locked chests, to bear the weight of our desire for accuracy. When we lie down, we sigh the vowels; we can make nothing without them, nor in our pleasure or our rest can we forget that we are knit with the sadness in our laws of grammar. We spell, we write, we read: blood spills from our mouths and into furrows. You who would learn this language, beware the vowels: to taste them is to know of sorrow. [Originally published in Western Humanities Review] Force in memory of Oscar Romero Not to the blue fuses do I knuckle. Not to boys’ muses—their sly kites, skylighters loosing fire, without sweep or buckle, onto a landscape so that they may blight its hills and gardens into history. Or myth. Not to these do I bow; not to the might in a sibilant, the judge who hears one say shibboleth, another say sibboleth, and knows, by accent, which to slaughter (even though translators can’t grasp that glyph— if it means corn, or flood, or if it matters to anyone save the drawling Ephraimites’ lines); and not to those who barter daughters for armor or for spoils, who fold paper cranes— those charms—from torn benedictions. Not to such do I cede, but to these dangers: to the stones hoarsely flinging requiem and jubilation; to a rabbi weeping into his sleeves; to women marching past the degradation that the grave is not and singing from the eaves with a prophet’s clap and spin; to the famed doubter’s hands, full, the moment he believes. To the far-sighted priest stammering every name of the disappeared—¡presente!—like it’s his own, because it is: because I was taken, aflame, inside the stem to a place where atoms moan in whirling congregations, where the tree’s coarse green hem is for the healing of the nations. Flown, it was in the core and pith, the cells’ recourse, that I found love: I was forced. [Originally published in Poetry London] Prayers to the Birds Mockingbird, tanager, thrush—you liltwings, you hopscotch-skippers—forgive us our calling, noun-bound to be proper, to freight your pinions with what yokes our weight to gravity, law, numbers, other fables. Forgive us our starry quills, our parables— rook, raven, crow, canary, dove— our willful migration from love to symbol. Wind-sickles, forgive us the sins visited on Icarus, his fathers and sons: our conceit in zeppelin and satellite, the feast of false hawks, false eagles. Forgive us as priests in slums and picket lines forgive the church: in vigilance, mining the breach— that sky—for something that will not be owned. Cardinal, finch—forgive us our lone hiding behind bushes, spying you out when we should be flying at your side, not from pride but from humility: that soaring force that finds its power in adoring. [Originally published in Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts] | ||||||||||||
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