A poetry reading I attended back in the winter of 2015 was kicked off with a reading of Laura Kasischke’s “For the Young Woman I Saw Hit by a Car While Riding Her Bike.”
I sat with a piece of loose leaf notebook paper and a pen, doodling, or more like scribbling, while listening.
“Laughter.
Shit happens.
To be young.
To shrug it off:
But, ah, sweet
thing, take
pity. One
day you too may be
an accumulation
of regrets, catastrophes.
A clay animation
of Psalm 73. (But
as for me, my feet. . .) No. It will be
Psalm 45: They
saw it,
and so they marveled; they
were troubled, and hasted away.”
At the end of the reading, I’d written down one thing on my piece of paper that was legible: Psalm 48. Not even one of the Psalms mentioned in the poem.
I believe I meant to write down Psalm 73, to look it up and gain a clearer image of what Kasischke wanted me to see as a clay animation, but for whatever reason, I wrote down 48. When I looked it up when I went home, my face scrunched up in confusion as it made no context with the poem whatsoever (I found out why later). But despite my bewilderment, I felt inspired by attending the reading, so I copied and pasted Psalm 48 into a word document and stared at it for a minute or two. Before tearing it open with filthy hands and gutting it.
Psalm 48 reads as follows,
Great is the Lord, and most worthy of praise,
in the city of our God, his holy mountain.
2
Beautiful in its loftiness,
the joy of the whole earth,
like the heights of Zaphon[b] is Mount Zion,
the city of the Great King.
3
God is in her citadels;
he has shown himself to be her fortress.
4
When the kings joined forces,
when they advanced together,
5
they saw her and were astounded;
they fled in terror.
6
Trembling seized them there,
pain like that of a woman in labor.
7
You destroyed them like ships of Tarshish
shattered by an east wind.
8
As we have heard,
so we have seen
in the city of the Lord Almighty,
in the city of our God:
God makes her secure
forever.[c]
9
Within your temple, O God,
we meditate on your unfailing love.
10
Like your name, O God,
your praise reaches to the ends of the earth;
your right hand is filled with righteousness.
11
Mount Zion rejoices,
the villages of Judah are glad
because of your judgments.
12
Walk about Zion, go around her,
count her towers,
13
consider well her ramparts,
view her citadels,
that you may tell of them
to the next generation.
14
For this God is our God for ever and ever;
he will be our guide even to the end.
However, my Psalm 48, which I alternately titled body blasphemy, is a little more discouraged, I suppose:
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| Poem featured courtesy of Alyssa Froehling. |
Oh. I guess my frustration concerning the treatment of gender within the church is showing. Sometimes we find poetry in forbidden places. Accidents, sacred things…are accidents sacred things?
You can try this out yourself, poet. You don’t have to be as blasphemous as I: just find someone else’s poem, song lyrics, etc., splice them up and see where it goes. Hopefully not hell.
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| Read thoughts, prompts, and more from the mind of Alyssa Froehling. |
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