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SABBATH

Tradition has the Sabbath
as a day of rest and contemplation,
a day of thoughtful appreciation of
what manifestly belongs to the Lord
Tradition says the Sabbath should be
the studious realm of sura and testament,
chapter and verse, call and response
across awesome scales that are 
universal and eternal
On this cool Sabbath morning
the October sun explodes through a gap
between the houses nearby, through the 
gold-orange leaves of the shedding oak
trees and the red leaves and berries of the
burning bush hedge and conspires with 
the wind to animate the shadows on the
breakfast room table, the Sunday morning
papers, my wife’s red sweater, the lenses 
of her glasses, the color on her lips, as
if breakfast at our home is in the middle
of a fire that I ought to be tending lest
it get out of hand

“Look at me!” she says, in a voice 
that reminds me of a nature documentary
in which a lioness in heat is shown smacking
the snout of an oblivious male then stepping 
deftly away from his toothy  response, 
a prurient voice reminding us both that our
Sabbath agenda is not about worship and
sermon and hymn, is not about prophesy,
the anointment of kings or arks and their
covenants, the miraculous adultery of 
immaculate conception or some good son of
man who escapes from the grave, promising to
return in apocalyptic glory

We are more about song, the tambourine
and the harp, the passionate poetry of the
singer of psalms, David and Bathsheba,
Solomon and Sheba, and Solomon’s Song,
more about love in the firelight of lust,
about naked desire and quivering embrace
in the gardens of delight by the murmuring 
waters of the rivers of life on the Lord’s
good earth, where we are bathed in the sun
that makes shadows and flames that sear 
and ignite, illuminate and burn, but never
destroy and never consume


Emanuel Carter
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