Poem: “Poem for Simone Weil”


To think of faith as mine
is to bar the door.
My precious, my purity,
truth’s little coin I can bestow
or hoard, or nail up to gleam
like the prize on Ahab’s mast.
Is it humility that dumbs
men who should beg for this?
They affront me who have not seen death
shining in the plattered fish’s eye
and on the sleek braided bread,
death diving through the blue air
on the metal wings they trust.
A spoonful of ashes
where the tower stood.
Or still stands. Time collapses
in my eyes like God’s.

This thing I believe
happened once to a man
who possessed nothing but his death—
father-forsaken, letting the light
of the nations go out
like a match dropped from burnt fingers.
What obedience to refuse
to set an example
of faith’s triumph, which is but a subtler
triumph of the will.

I was on that hill, on the spit of land
where the walls fell into flame
and all around me wept, amazed and bloody
as babies after a hard birth
into all that cold space called the world,
their first permanence shaken.
Now you see what I see,
I thought
with relief, God help me.


      published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Spring/Summer 2003

3 comments on “Poem: “Poem for Simone Weil”

  1. brian says:

    I really liked this poem.When somthing you read makes you think it has to be good.I hope i,m on the right track but on 9 11 i was checking cattle identification ear tags on my own. I do,nt know what happened but I came to with a bloody nose across the cattle crush, perhaps the hiefer I was dealing with had caught me and put me out. But Irememer the feeling that whatever had hapened to me it was,nt important. I carried on went home made a cup of hot sweet tea turned on the tv and there it was. I could,nt believe it. It did,nt matter about me I went off to milk my cows I would recover.

  2. zhenimsja says:

    Hello, mate! I am completely accede to this way of assessment and everything joined.

  3. Lorraine says:

    Thanks for the insight. It birgns light into the dark!

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