Golden Shovel as Florida in August (Song of Songs 4:3)
This weather demands a stillness like
a breath held under bedrock, your body a
bright field your mind can’t cross, a scarlet
zone on the map where storms are born. You thread
your way through the adhesive air until your
lungs are greased with effort, your lips
curling inward as if to protect your teeth and
tongue from the midday soup that soaks your
face and seeks shelter in your mouth, though your mouth
owns nothing but more heat. Even language is
helpless to grapple with a dewpoint rising past delightful
and reaching an index that stinks like
something built from animal guts. What a
spoiled species you are says a bored angel, whose voice could cut
the sun from the sky like a rotten pomegranate
if anything like mercy remained for your
kind. Questioning the messenger flares your cheeks
with further shame. We have fallen behind
in our promises, is what the angel might hear should your
own voice unearth the strength to slip past your sodden tresses.
Golden Shovel as Return to the Fold (Song of Songs 1:4)
I have used this lifetime to draw
——–Your face, God. How will You punish me?
All of us outlaws skittering through Your fingers—we
——–depend on distraction, pray our mistakes will
free us from Your gaze. We run
——–wild through the valleys of Your planet, calling after
each other like children playing pilgrim after dark: I see thee
——–in thy tall hat and buckled shoes! (How like us to mock the
previously oppressed, forgetting we’ve all been victims of a king,
——–long ago or recently.) I don’t know what has
lately made me defiant, God. For years I brought
——–You everywhere with me,
even briefly shouldering You into
——–the religion I adopted for love. But those were his
beliefs and never mine, a secret I stabled in the chambers
——–of my mind as though You couldn’t see inside. We
are all fools for the beloved, even when it will
——–shatter us. I could not be
kept from Your house for long. I was glad
——–to put that anything-goes faith behind me and
scramble back to Your rules. Not that I rejoice
——–in my own inconstancy. Not that I believe my place in
Your flock is always waiting, promised to me like You
——–promised numberless descendants to Abraham. Are we
the disappointment I suspect we are? Will
——–we keep losing our confidence in You, hoping to find
it again as wanderers hope to find hoofprints leading to Your
——–oases? Maybe the truest test of our love
is not how we keep believing when more
——–and more of us fall to our enemies, battlefields fragrant
with loss, but how we behave when more than
——–our own lives is at stake. War feeds on that wine-
red anger running into the sea. My God, I sincerely
——–don’t know what You want from us. Do
we make a new song for our enemies as they
——–burn and starve? Is it useless to want You to love
their children, too? This is all I ask of You.
Becka Mara McKay is a poet and translator. She directs the Creative Writing MFA at Florida Atlantic University, where she is faculty advisor to Swamp Ape Review. Her newest book is The Little Book of No Consolation (Barrow Street Press). Recent work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Greensboro Review, Harpur Palate, Cincinnati Review, and Puerto del Sol. Her forthcoming chapbook Witness for the Destruction won the Elyse Wolf Prize from Slate Roof Press.