The Argument
I.
When I was nine, God was a bush aflame,
a sacred secret burning thing alive
in some empty and forsaken desert.
At ten he became a name invoked
over the bodies of dead relatives
I once knew, lowered into the strange earth.
Then later he became You. You, who fashioned
all from nothing with a simple wish.
II.
I stand at Babi Yar’s edge, peering down
to where 33,771 Jews and 100,000 others
were laid low: here the woman
who saw her daughter shot just before;
there an old man still thinking his life
can be bought for four teeth’s worth of gold.
Where were You then, when the barrel roughly
nuzzled the nape of this boy’s neck?
Where were You, when this girl’s blood
exploded onto her killer’s shirt?
The scratches etched by finger-bones
on gas chamber walls—each of them spells Yahweh.
Did You provide them one last sweet breath?
There are times I wish to disbelieve in You,
banish you into superstitious myth;
but still my faith persists, because only in a universe
so infinite as to contain You could such cruelty exist.
It is the times I feel You with me
that are the most unforgiveable.
Oracles
There are times when I wish desperately
to hear your voice again for the first time
so that I could come to it again
innocent, move through your words
as stars guided the ships to Delphi
delivering their cargo (questions),
and stand before the oracle’s cave,
see the goat, cold-water-splashed, shivering,
and know that I may enter the mystery
and feel my being answered.
M. Benjamin Thorne is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Wingate University. Possessed of a lifelong love of history and poetry, he is interested in exploring the synergy between the two. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Autumn Sky Poetry, Drunk Monkeys, Sky Island Journal, Wilderness House Literary Review, Cathexis Northwest, and The Westchester Review. He lives and sometimes sleeps in Charlotte, NC.
Sparks of Calliope 