Landscape & Ecology in the Old Testament OT3345 - Spring 2021
Poems by Matthew Green &
Paintings by Marisa Keris
Ta-na-si I hear it most days, song of return The ones who stayed call it a curse: They say the ones who left will be drawn Back into the landscape, impasto on pentimenti The layers of paint beneath paint The sky’s a sfumato up where The Holston meets the French Broad:
The blue of your birth becoming less Blue as you curve through Chattanooga Tongue and groove, water licking Limestone and chert, Ta-na-si: Your mouths and sloughs muffled An untranslatable language The lost lexicon of late summer The valley’s a palimpsest And you the first text, now a trace
In the aura of August humidity
I am trying to uncover and write again A scribal error: When all the while You are rewriting me.
A Prayer All is snuffed out, gone The black-throated wind Hacks its last gasp The white birch hangs still Bronchial without breath It’s that old song and dance Slow as the Tennessee Waltz The little 1, 2, 3 of oblivion . . . Deerskin our eyes, Lord Clawhammer our hearts We ignore the world’s thumb pick The catgut click It thumps and pools in our ears We hide our ears, Lord It dies in our ears We mumble and stammer Our tongue a catwalk of silence Our tongue a flattened rose We fumble with darkness We call it our own When it’s yours, Lord
The Child
I’m starting to remember the child his small fire, mouth of birds, clothes screaming full of bees. The chainsaw, the dead pear tree. Forbidden, his father overalled, bending to impart the hive and swarm the child beginning to forget.
Forest Lament I How long, O Lord, will your forests burn? Your ancient redwoods writhe. Your eucalyptus moan. The homes of your creatures Turn to embers and ash. Our prayers rise like the fire’s smoke. Dissipating, unanswered. Lord, why do you keep yourself hidden? II Consider your creation, Lord! Let your clouds pour healing rain. Remember the day when your Whole earth rested and was quiet. Let it come again, Lord. For we reap what we have sown, Becoming our own enemy, And we weep at our own complicity. Lord, teach us to keep your creation In its splendor and majesty Whose source is you, Lord. III Now our praises rise like the grass. We trust that you hear them, O Lord my God! You have heard and answered before, A door forever open, accepting our praise Like an ear, so inclined, accepts a song. Lord, we long for your lasting gaze, And for your steadfast love, which has kept us all along.
Without Us In the land of crimson heat a strange vine takes root Shooting forth green statues sculpted in high relief Whole valleys swallowed snakes breed in its flowers The cardinal pulses in then out a blood clot Set loose through the warm mesh of air and light Arteries of a summer day the milk cows feast It is beautiful without us Spreading over cities where night Dogs howl the hoarse icy call of the American crow All heard without us Southern men in pieces their Monuments smothered the ruins of lost causes Their stone horses broken pale and supplicant torsos Slung heavenward the mover Unmoved the world as it was as it’s becoming Beautiful without us