ABRAHAM AND THE ANGEL
Now I know
that you fear God
—said the angel—
offer that ram
in his place,
and remember:
if God asks you
to sacrifice your son,
that is not God.
ON THE SIXTH DAY
On the sixth day God saw the world still lacked
a being to inhabit it; in His own image
from clay He shaped him, molding hope
from pliant earth that lay beneath His feet.
When He beheld the finished anatomy,
He breathed on him and man was given life;
and God saw it was good, seeing reunited
within that creature all He had intended.
Yet God saw that the man did not love being alone,
though he still scarcely knew what solitude was;
He opened up his side while he lay sleeping
upon a bed of earth. While in deepest dream
God made a counterpart, God made him company;
the man awoke and saw that it was good.
CAIN AND ABEL
“The blood of your brother cries out to Me from the ground,”
said God to Cain after He had questioned him;
there was no faithful answer, no ashamed gesture,
only the weight of that crime that will banishes the guilty.
Envy raised its hand and took up a jawbone,
shattering Abel’s skull and cruelly ending his life.
The field bore witness to that infamy, that wound,
that cry of horror upon the sullied earth.
FIFTY-NINE
God struck me
with His mighty hand
until I fell,
and with that same hand
He lifted me from the ground.
That is what I would have said
had anyone
asked me
what my soul was feeling
during those days that passed
between my mother’s death
and my daughter’s birth.
Fifty-nine days and their nights.
In the most dreadful solitude,
my mother left the realm of the living.
I could not be at her side.
I could not hear her final words.
I cannot picture that moment,
that cruel joke
so brutally real.
Even if I had managed
to gather
the money,
enough
to travel back and forth
from our shared island
(even then),
some absurd legal circumstance
would have prevented me.
At times
I think none of it happened.
Perhaps I must wait
until I see her grave
to finally grasp
once and for all
the exact dimension
of the word death.
Meanwhile,
I disguise my grief.
I try to channel
my rightful anger
in a positive way.
When my daughter laughs
(and she does so often),
that is enough for me to understand,
once and for all,
the exact dimension
of the word life.
LOT’S WIFE BEHELD THE DISTANCE
Lot’s wife beheld the distance
(her house left behind, her home, her life),
and in that instant she became
a statue of salt, lifeless and cold.
Lot’s wife beheld that memory
still crying out for rescue in the flames.
She saw so little; her body turned to scales
of saltpetre, sluggish as stone.
Lot’s wife beheld that past
like one who yields to suicidal longing;
unable to decide what mattered most:
to flee or to mourn, ignoring urgency;
she stopped and turned her head in the crossing
to look once more at what she had left behind.
DAVID AND GOLIATH
Five smooth stones he carries,
the boy who has arrived
with a sling in his hand
and the courage God gave him.
He asked to be allowed
to answer the challenge; Saul smiled.
“How could you face him?”
The boy replied:
“I have defeated lion and bear,
for God has always saved me.”
Forty days and forty nights
the giant issued his challenge
to King Saul and his men;
no one found the courage.
Across the valley
the shepherd made his way;
he wore no armor
but the sling he brought,
a staff in his other hand.
“I travel light,” he smiled,
perhaps thinking of his mother
or the sheep he left behind.
At last he stops;
his path has ended.
Between the ranks of soldiers
he sees the one who challenged them
for forty days and nights,
the one none
dared answer.
David cries out and calls him;
the other steps
forward at once.
“Here I am,” says the giant,
“Who has spoken my name?”
David steps ahead,
resolute, unafraid;
before him stands the Philistine,
immense as his mother bore him;
his mother a Philistine,
his father I do not know.
Seeing the boy before him,
some say he thought:
“Exhausted, the Jews
send me what remains.”
The giant’s steel
flashed in his hand.
“Who are you, and what do you want?”
he snarled with scorn.
“I am David; I come to kill you
in the name of the Lord,
He who created you from nothing
though you be but dung.”
The stone flew through the air,
struck him on the forehead;
the giant fell to the ground,
his blood staining the soil.
The shepherd drew near,
saw the sword at his side,
grasped it firmly with both hands,
raised it high,
and brought it down upon Goliath
with all the weight of God,
severing his throat,
cutting off his head.
DAVID AND NATHAN
The king has listened to the prophet’s voice;
it shows upon his face the vices he conceals.
Naively he asks who it is, probing foolishly,
seeking a culprit behind the fracture
in the kingdom’s honor. The answer is harsh,
and painful to a king facing the mirror:
“You are that man, O David, spoken of here,
sick with lust and shadowed passion.
For the woman who does not belong to you
you caused the death of your finest soldier.
You shall not die as one who strikes another;
your sins, indeed, have been forgiven,
but your lust still merits punishment:
the sword shall never leave your house.”
THE BANQUET OF HEROD
The soldier presented John’s head
upon a silver platter to the king.
The table was set, and from that feast
no cause for complaint could be found.
Wine flowed in torrents; the Baptist’s blood
had flowed before. Behind the veils, naked,
Salome waited to fulfill the desires,
the vile obsession of that hedonistic king.
Truth fell silent where appearances spoke,
and foolish honor swore to uphold indecency,
fearing the prophet more than sin itself.
And thus, amid delicacies, conscience died;
for when power is served without restraint,
the blood of the just will delight the audience.
THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT
They then understood that they were naked,
having eaten of the forbidden fruit;
Eden was no longer the sleeping refuge,
and, unable to express it, they fell silent.
Shame was born as an urgent veil;
they stitched leaves to that clinging fear,
and that good—that evil, so suddenly learned—
fed upon their bodies like beasts in heat.
The light they sought began the fall:
to gain knowledge was to lose primal purity,
that unnamed joy the soul once held.
It was lost among concepts of night and day.
Since then mankind dreams and hopes all the more,
seeking the return of lost innocence.
THAT INNER GOD
That daily God of ours
who has nothing to do
with circumcision,
and who cares very little
about Muslim Fridays,
Jewish Saturdays, Christian Sundays,
or whichever rite
of the many
that men invent
to feel protected—
that is the God I believe in.
My grandmother baptized me
so that He would protect me.
My grandmother, may she rest in peace.
My grandmother’s God
was a God
anthropomorphically
conceived,
a kind of powerful, distant man,
incapable of being born
and incapable of dying.
That is what
I always believed
watching her sit
and pray softly.
Today I am not so sure.
Perhaps,
feeling goodness
within herself,
my sweet grandmother
could sense that God was
hidden somewhere
deep inside her
and found no words
to explain it to me.
If so, her vigilance
made sense,
because that inner God
has always accompanied me.
He was my moral compass
and kept me from blinding myself with hatred
when I had reasons to do so.
That inner God
helped me discern
between what you call good
and what I call evil.
That inner God
is the God I believe in.
JACOB’S LADDER
He who wrestled with God until dawn
sleeps stretched upon the earth he crosses in flight;
Jacob dreams a dream in which He visits him
by the roadside, in his most fragile hour.
“I am the God of your fathers, the God of your sons.
The ladder you see connects earth and heaven.
Through it I know every human longing,
every portion of the soul and its secrets.
By it each angel shall descend to man,
as your widened eyes behold even now.
Your pure heart shall know good fortune;
though now you doubt or marvel awake,
the lands you tread shall be inherited
by those who grow from your future seed.”
THE FIRST STONE
“The first stone,” he said,
“let the one who can
say he has never sinned
without the pain of lying
be the one to cast it;
provided that falsehood
chills the soul
when God is witness,
not the quarrelsome crowd
ever eager to judge.”
The adulteress still waited
for stones upon her head.
He withdrew to write
words upon the sand,
while the mob,
so recently inflamed, ready to stone
that woman
with the anger of
self-righteous sense of justice,
abandoned the scene;
one by one they vanished,
knowing they all were guilty
of some sin,
like that woman.
Scribes and Pharisees
felt deep shame,
seeing Christ victorious
over their cunning trap;
for without breaking the Law
He found a way
to expose the falseness
of their doctrine.
When all had gone,
Jesus asked her:
“Is there no one left to judge you?”
She looked at the empty square.
“No, Lord, they have all gone,”
she answered quickly.
“Neither do I judge you
nor condemn you.
Go in peace,
and do not sin again,”
Jesus said,
and wrote upon the sand
a lesson indelible
for whoever would understand it.
THE GODS’ GATE
Languages were confused where man
sought to build a tower reaching heaven;
from the vast earth his arrogance raised
a proud edifice with an eternal name.
Babylon the great, gate of the gods,
but also the place where humanity disperses,
the most diverse mixture,
offering impossible encounters and farewells.
Man believed heaven would yield its mandate,
challenged the imposed limit, trusted in brick
and the strength of his arm;
but found an answer to foolish defiance:
the word was lost, failure made plain,
and speech fractured beyond repair.
THE SOLITUDE OF GOD
When they say He created man
in His own likeness,
it seems hopeful to think
He shaped us as a mirror
and gave us something
divine,
that base matter
bears some trace of Him,
that our wandering illusion
holds a spark of star.
As the artist imagines
and seeks perfection,
He did not forget affection;
He gave form feminine,
the same God who decrees
that instead of one there be two.
When you suffer every farewell
and still feel miserable,
think that nothing compares
to the solitude of God.
THE BURNING BUSH
The deity called Moses from a bush,
a bramble that burns yet is not consumed;
the flame does not destroy, it only illumines
and gathers the task requiring a steadfast heart.
Moses now understands that God will guide him,
will make the impossible a daily task:
to free his people, to lead them where flow
milk and honey, and God. What else could matter?
“I Am,” says that flame admitting no form,
turning the shepherd into word and path.
All this and more you shall do, O Moses, the bush has spoken,
and through it God has spoken, flame without enclosure.
“I Am Who I Am,” He reminds him, holding his staff,
armed with faith and the urgency of destiny.
FAR FROM EDEN
If, as Genesis tells us,
we were once created
man and woman, expelled
from the garden as an affront;
the Bible says so,
though it must be noted
that by reinventing love
we return to Eden
when we give one another
reason to breathe.
A paradox where giving
is receiving at once,
where dying in reverse
resembles resurrection;
losing oneself to find
so simple and supreme a good
that it lies in the who
more than in how or when,
the gerund of love: loving,
near and far from Eden.
CALL IT AS YOU WISH
The idea of God
is not planted in your mind
when life is good
and smiles at you
with thirty-two
pristine teeth,
like the best commercial
for the best toothpaste
in the best of possible worlds.
It is planted, rather,
with all its force,
when everything you love
is taken from you
and yet,
despite being unable
to find a reason to keep standing,
a mysterious force
you cannot dismantle, dissect,
or even rationally accept
(call it God, call it spirit,
call it whatever you wish)
prevents you from collapsing.
MY CHILDREN
I have a heart
with two halves.
The smaller half
is so by a difference
of three years,
two months,
and twenty-three days.
I never thought I would have children
until the day I did.
It must be one of those unfathomable mysteries
why,
despite everything said,
we always insist on reproducing.
Well, that mystery is called God.
I never thought I would be a good father
until the day I was.
My children awakened
what was noble and generous
sleeping within me.
They, the two of them,
gave me life.
Today I ask myself
how I was so naïve
to believe my existence as a person
was an end in itself.
My children freed me
from my own freedom.
For them I fought
like a cornered cat.
For them I would do it again,
and again,
and as many times as necessary.
I have a heart
with two halves,
a kind of engine
that awakens my arteries.
Two reasons to live,
if any were still needed.
JONAH’S MONOLOGUE
That immense fish spat me onto solid ground
after three days of shadow and stillness;
obedience sprang from my soul,
and I accepted I would no longer war with God.
Fleeing Nineveh I sought a place to hide,
but in the storm His great power found me;
by sailors’ hands I was cast into the sea,
and the monster of the waters came to save me.
I no longer fear the voice that orders my fate;
I will preach forgiveness even in the pagan city.
I fear only fire, if it be divine fire.
The plant that withered taught me early:
if I mourn its shade, how much more foolish
not to understand His mercy toward human misery?
FORGETTING IT IS A GERUND
Each day a little more,
free of all falsehood,
forgetting it is a gerund,
I find some measure of peace.
I have a dream—and more:
I have God, I have a path.
These are the workings of destiny
beginning to speak;
today the traps of thought
matter not a whit to me.
THEY INSTALL
They install bones,
they install flesh,
they install skin,
and, not to call it hardware,
they call it body.
They install ideas,
they install concepts,
they install notions of good and evil,
hate and love,
they install ways of operating
and of living—
all mixed together—
and instead of calling it software,
they call it mind.
They install a beep
that activates another software,
a pre-operating presystem,
and no one says it is firmware;
we only know what it is not,
and lacking a better name,
they call it soul.
DEPTH
I, who was born from an orchard
without borders or gods,
had to create God,
the very God
who created me.
SACRED AND PROFANE
Of the sacred and the profane
one might debate
endlessly,
questioning what it means to be human.
If a god shaped man by hand,
barro and breath,
if He granted him suffering,
gave him guilt and wound,
such was the price of a life
that made that moment eternal.
If, gazing at the firmament,
the star within us cries out,
it is because that god demands of us
our blood, the fulfillment
of a divine commandment:
to return to being one in Him
without perishing.
Our sacred profanity
is the antithesis of the nothingness
we leave at birth.
SODOM AND GOMORRAH
That deafening outcry reached the heights:
God’s law was ignored in Sodom
and in Gomorrah, her sister in vice and scent,
concupiscent and vile, of twisted depths.
For one just man He tempers the punishment,
that God who still weighs the abyss in His wrath;
the mob’s fervor revels in pleasure,
ignorant that the day will have no witness.
Bodies writhe, thirsty for sin;
the fatal transgression will soon exact its toll.
Of the city lost to excess and madness
only one witness shall remain, saved with his kin.
The angels bring law and divine retribution:
unyielding fury, sulfur, rain, and fire.
TWENTY-ONE, THE SEEDS
“Their God is my God,”
the sub-Saharan man replied,
without hesitation, rejecting escape.
“Their cross is my cross,” he said.
Who would refuse
when life is offered
in exchange for denying your brother?
Their God is mine,
there on the Libyan shore
where twenty-one Copts were sacrificed,
one by one slain, throats cut,
recorded on video
for greater lust.
There was no plea of fear,
no trembling voice;
united in prayer unto the final breath.
They sought to humiliate them;
they achieved the opposite.
For their blood upon the sand
is a stubborn monument
to that carpenter God who left us the cross:
twenty-one seeds
watered with blood.
