Not specific this God beyond understanding
Said Elihu to Job long ago.
Outstretches all classification,
Not bound by identity one or another,
Bigger than any holy publication,
God above definition of those who made God
Pleasing to themselves, that is,
A gender-ascribed Bronze Age tribal god of war
Unable to deliver from foreign control who
Now saves only souls who believe such a thing.
Not specific this God beyond understanding
Said Elihu to Job long ago.
Outstretches all classification,
Not bound by identity one or another,
Bigger than any holy publication,
God above definition of those who made God
Pleasing to themselves, that is,
A gender-ascribed Bronze Age tribal god of war
Unable to deliver from foreign control who
Now saves only souls who believe such a thing.
Leaving the War Behind
for Elihu Burritt, peacemaker
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
- H. W. Longfellow, “Christmas Bells”
1863, your old friend Longfellow almost
despairing. What a year! The Union
torn. Chancellorsville. War’s ravenous mouth.
And then came Vicksburg, Gettysburg.
The whole land lay in a bloody drouth,
the cannon thundered in the South,
and Elihu, you sailed away. For years
you let the ink flow like a sea
to float the cause of Peace. Yet you found
no peace at home. Was it a personal
surrender, to be England-bound?
And with the sound
of waves and seabirds, did you leave
behind the burden of a homeland
north to south a battleground?
Could a foreign landscape comfort
you? Or did war images confound –
the carols drowned
in military march-time in your head?
As summer waned, the loss of Chickamauga.
Brother killing brother in a marshy fen.
Elihu, did you never quite give up
the distant hope – oh where, and when? –
of peace on earth, good-will to men?
[It is the spontaneous utterance of the universal conscience.
- Elihu Burritt, “The Empire of Public Opinion”]
Remember that day, Elihu,
when you stood at your forge as the earth
shook underfoot. A steam-locomotive,
come to change the world.
Foot-traveler by choice, you walked out
to see what was left after the passing
of the Iron Dragon, and found a printing press
already spreading the news.
In not so many years, the Trans-Atlantic-Telegraph
would spread it even faster. You imagined
John of Patmos transported to your time, declaring
there was no more sea to separate
the continents, there was time no longer
between the event and the whole globe’s knowing it.
How quickly things can change,
yet some things seem to ever stay the same.
What word would you spread, Elihu?
You say Slavery at last is dead. But War –
destroyer of the soul – remains. Let the people
speak. Let it be God’s word. Peace.
... [into] the oaken box in which the hunted King was secreted....
Capern essayed to descend...
- Elihu Burritt, Walks in the Black Country (1868)
Suppose a poet-postman, full of good Victorian
Embonpoint, should chance to
Step into this house of hiding – a nook unknown to
Questing Roundhead spies – and think to slip
Unseen into the oubliette fitted out
In Cromwell’s days for a king; suppose this very
Poet – more portly in the midriff than Charles
Escaping from his throne – gets caught
Dead-center in the all-too-narrow trap-door gap.
Alas, for all his wriggling, he’s trapped
Longitudinally between floors. What can a poet,
Ill-versed in such historic lore, do but
Taunt the Muses with his long, many-syllabled
Yelps, unrhyming but in vivid metaphor?