Jonah
“Go to Ninevah,” He says. “Cry out against them.”
The farthest port from here,
halfway to here be dragons,
that’s where I’ll go.
Wretchedly seasick aboard that foreign scow.
Who’d have thought the God who thunders in the desert mountains
would dog my heels to the coast,
thrash in the sea and tear around on gusts of deafening wind?
Barbarians casting lots;
Why am I not surprised I’m the one they pick
to feed the sea-monster whose hunger churns
the Mediterranean shallows into looming waves like wrathful tentacles?
Out another second-rate, reluctant prophet,
Maybe the whale is swimming westward?
Down that gaping gullet. Afloat in gastric stew
three nights, I reckon in that foul cave,
pitch black. I should be decomposing.
My express ride to Assyria hurks me up, surly and sodden on the beach.
I wonder if he would have liked to be riding a warm current off Galicia,
splashing in the wake of a fishing boat,
anywhere but here;
if he was hunting squid when a storm
shoved him up next to my ship to splutter, choke,
swallow me down reflexively,
and be beached three days hike from Ninevah.
Circling Jerusalem
Leaving Nazareth –
the gold was spent,
the frankincense and myrrh used up; their fragrance
no longer clung to clothing; I smelled like a carpenter’s kid.
Let me float away in this muddy current. I’ll just stay under;
their voices are so far away.
His skinny arms draw me up, his eyes, sunken in his leathery face,
pierce mine with sympathy when I flinch at the thunder from the throng.
Sun-blinded, I stagger up on the bank
and stumble into the desert.
I am not cut out for miracles.
I wear out umpteen pairs of sandals,
circling nearer and nearer Jerusalem,
leaving full wine jars, piles of abandoned crutches, outraged Pharisees behind me.
Golgatha looms in the corner of my eye;
I let a woman rub my tired feet. I am coming in my own time.
Take this cup away from me?
I drink and drink, craving wetness, and am never quenched.
My cup runs over, my blood runs out.
I drag my cross to the ridge and cling to it.
The grave spits me out at Mary’s feet.
Panting, I rest my head on the dirt, suck dew from the grass tips.
(c) Sarah Morehouse 2003
Flood
Six-year-old eyes full of striped tents and palm trees,
a lady with a jar, a lady with a tambourine,
a man with curly hair and a sea of happy people.
One page stopped me, stayed with me
like a brick in my stomach -
Musk oxen foamy-mouthed, flailing purchaseless,
leopards, elephants, tortoises clinging to logs,
bedraggled, flattened by the lashing rain.
Burrow, field, sunning rock washed away and deep
beneath dirty-frothing waves,
bewildered refugees tossed up on ramshackle flotsam islands.
Despite cozy ark rafter-packed with fauna,
Noah, his nameless wife and sturdy sons
could float or sink for all I cared, with God
to guard them and their salvaged herds,
breeding stock for the new world -
only, after all, the world newly empty.
(c) Sarah Morehouse 2003
