Questions for God, featuring poems by James Littwin, Anastasia Vassos, Maryhelen Snyder and Wilderness Sarchild.
8 minutes
TRANSCRIPT
Besides being Tax Deadline Time, this is also a week when a lot of people are thinking about Spring and rebirth. We’re increasingly aware of new life in nature, from daffodils poking up out of the ground to trees budding to birds returning from the south, to baby bunnies running around. It’s a time when many of us are thinking about the religious Spring holidays. Ramadan ended recently; that’s the period that Muslims believe the prophet Muhammed was given the first revelations of the Quran from the angel Gabriel. We’re in the middle of Passover, when Jews commemorate the exodus from Egypt to freedom. And we’re in the middle of Christianity’s Holy Week, on the way from Palm Sunday to Easter, commemorating Jesus’s death and resurrection.
So it seems like as good a time as any for some pieces that reflect on the concept of God and that sort of thing.
James Littwin said he was an altar boy and a seminarian, a happy, prayerful member of a large and loving Catholic clan with its symbols, scruples, Masses and faith. He said his poem “Pearl” grew out of visiting his mother at extended care facilities and old people’s homes, listening to “a choir of women who, as they declined and lost their independence, spoke solos, holding all the tighter to their dignity.”
I hope, she said,
heaven’s not crowded.
I’ve been crowded
all my life,
and here we are,
all thirty of us,
wheeled together,
pointed at one tv,
watching nonsense
while the chapel’s cool
and empty.
I’ve known tenements
and close, damp schools,
lines of families
waiting their turn
at city pools,
and long tables where,
when the platters came around,
all that was left
were backs and wings.
I’ve stood for years
with aching feet
on lurching buses
and on the el,
hanging from straps,
swaying in bunches,
breaking off like fruit.
I tell you, if heaven
doesn’t have a lonely bench
at the end of a long wooden pier
where I can walk over water
and sit alone, breathing
deep, moist morning breezes,
then tell them at the trumpet
and all that racket of rising,
What difference does it make?
Just leave me here!
From the Winter ’24 issue of Passager, James Littwin’s poem “Pearl.”
Anastasia Vassos was raised in a Greek Orthodox community. She said. As I’ve gotten older, I yearn to discover what’s greater than I am, a universal truth, an abiding beauty. I have come to understand that the big questions have their answers in the particular. Poetry is my vehicle for examining my agnosticism and seeking that meaning.” Here’s Anastasia’s poem “Dear God.”
Dear God
I saw you today in the grocery store
stacking pomegranates. I recognized your dreadlocks.
I saw you holding my American Heritage dictionary
page 48 searching all the words with Greek roots.
There you were in the maple tree’s phalanges
the blaring canopy grounded
wet leaves and the grass
stunted by November’s cheek.
At 4 a.m. you appeared behind my eyelids
in the shape of a boat – was that on purpose? –
– struts and joints and ribs
and stretchers almost shining.
Thank you for my body. Thank you for listening
to my babbling until an hour before dark.
In the park, the Orthodox priest passes
floating on his cloud of faith
his black cassock, his cylindrical hat
long and tall. I wipe dust off my shoe.
I thought that was you in soot on my finger
after I passed it through the candle flame.
Dear God,
when you see me eating in church
it’s because I hunger.
From Passager’s 2022 Poetry Contest issue, “Dear God” by Anastasia Vassos.
Passager’s 2016 Poetry Contest winner Maryhelen Snyder said, “I have never believed in
“original sin.” Every need and urge of a human being is inherently beautiful. Maria Montessori saw this reality and Carl Rogers saw it. Beyond this foundational assumption, the poem says it better than I can say it.” Here’s Maryhelen Snyder’s poem “The Deadly Seven.”
And what if they were deadly virtues,
these so called sins of Sloth, Greed, Lust,
et cetera? We would watch with Envy,
the infant mouth, breathless with hunger,
gasp, grasp the dripping nipple,
the warm font, and drink with all its muscle.
We would know there is no foreplay needed
to excite desire.
And the swollen breast
craves the hungry mouth with equal longing.
What if the rights to life, liberty and boundless Joy
were birthrights as we said, demanding that
we disobey any authority but our own souls?
We would invite our Sloth, eating the apple
as we lie in an open field. With nothing
to be done until its doing draws us as earth
draws light, we’d loll and wait. But not for long.
Burning, trembling in neuronal fire, watch how
the child, facing six brightly colored rings
in graduated sizes, is eager beyond all stilling
to place them in order on their towering peg.
Nor is her Pride in self, but in self’s triumphs.
And if some fool dare dismantle this, bless
Anger too, her rage against the thwarting
of the Light.
Nor can we out-age Lust. Were
Christ to come again in David’s body, we would
bow down gladly to flesh and sinew. What is not
deadly that is this alive?
“The Deadly Seven,” Maryhelen Snyder.
And finally, from Wilderness Sarchild’s book Old Women Talking, “The Holy Word.”
I do not know the meaning of aleph
or bet or gimmel, but today
I heard a Rebbe speak, and his lips
rolled around each letter
like a lover’s embrace, the man
kissing the Word with the gentleness
of a husband, growing old, more devoted
to his love with each passing day.
Wilderness Sarchild, “The Holy Word.”
To buy Wilderness’s book Old Women Talking, subscribe to, contribute to, or learn more about Passager and its commitment to older writers, go to passagerbooks.com. Passager offers a 25% discount on the books and journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.
For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
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