LITANY HANNAH TEVES
Published by MARGUERITE hnteves@gmail.com © 2018
1. I’ve been talking to God over cups of coffee, it tells me about the new kittens at the ranch, I tell God about the book I’m writing & I ask if there really is a bowl carrying all the water in the world. God sips & there is foam on its lip & it nods.
2. I have written a few poems about God but I do not think I think much about God, just enough that I feel it is sometimes there with a Hundred Hands & it is lifting us up & up & washes us out on the riverbanks & sets us on warm stones to dry, & that is all that God is, sometimes!
3. In California we are not scared of big cats or devils on the rooftops or men with yellow eyes, no! But we are scared of other things, like the fires & long stretches of road when you drive at night up the 5 freeway, & boys with guns, & things that touch your feet in the sea, & we make our prayers to things like fruit farms or the rains in January.
4. Oh, don’t be angry with me! I loved you & though I loved you, you were too sweet & good! You stayed too long, you kept me up in her bobby pins, darling, so let’s have a fall in May & you’ll be just as nice as oak leaves again, amen.
5. God is thirty-seven, he said. And we are older.
6. An angel stops by the grocery. An angel buys lettuce & a bag of organic green apples & frozen dumplings. An angel passes through the electric doors.
7. Column, smoke clambering up the sky, Safi said that God likes to be in towers and pillars and such, there’s a car at the bottom of it, real broken up. Do you think God wanted to try to climb up there again? There’re big red bushes burning too and a fireman wondering if his name is Moses.
8. O! Light, my sun, come back, come back. Come again, O day, dear day, dear day.
9. Darling! I’m heading out to hell, tell me if you want anything, I’ll pick it up on the way back, will you still be home?