I worked this Good Friday.
I did not pray.
I wrote about prayer, though.
Made it sound good,
like something worth doing;
I believe I wrote that
doing was praying,
and singed the praises of those who did
good works.
I wrote about them
and did not pray,
yet hoped my work
was prayer, hoped
my prayer was good
in the same way,
I hope this poem
turns to prayer.
Next year, I will pray
on Good Friday
even if I have good work
to do.
On Holy Thursday they found her body
snaking down the Eel River, blond hair
hiding decomposed flesh. Her family
mourned her on Good Friday —
today.
The Unabomber sits in jail, just charged.
A math professor gone bad; theorems turned
into action, into horrible corollaries.
Rescuers search for our Commerce Secretary
who did not know what broke when
his military jet mistook a mountain for a cloud.
Too much has happened this week.
My colleagues call this a good news day.
They are spared from running fluff on the cover.
This all sells. People want to know —
Was she nude? Did she use drugs?
Did he really survive on parsnips?
Did the Bosnians sabotage the plane?
I chose not to sit and pray
to remember the day He died
while others stood by wanting to know
when he would die or if
the weight of his hung life,
the nail holes, the knife wound
in his side or the disgrace
would erase his life.
I had a deadline
for the magazine I write
and really no deadline at all other
than my wanting Easter Day off
and the week to play,
to enjoy my son’s fourth birthday.
Forgive me my vanity, my values,
O Lord, I pray;
Forgive me for my work —
the glory I take in my son’s joy,
the fear I feel for him, for my daughter,
for my soul’s struggle for perfection.
I am too human.
I would watch you die,
write it down, write
how the blood streaked your side like wine
and your mother wept into her veil,
while I asked the guards
to spell their names for me
so that I could get it right.
Wondering what to write
for this year’s passion poem,
thought of nothing
then the clutch began to slip
on the uphill ascent to the garage
knowing they’d have to remove the
traney to free the clutch
and not under warranty
I took the streetcar to work,
the car jouncing in the tunnel below
Twin Peaks, wondered
if the driver was on drugs, his
foot jammed against a dead-man’s pedal,
we emerged at West Portal, no
angels greeting us with rolled back stone,
at work I turned on my computer and saw yesterday’s work
gone, an INIT glitch nailed me, I think,
buried under my work I wait
for daylight, still, it could
be worse, don’t want
to think about it, though.
My daughter fears the night
facing her bed alone, unstoried and abrupt.
She wants to come and join the din.
She does not know my sadness, my
self-pitying whine that I let slip
as prayer each hour over small matters
of money and home. She wants my arm
to encircle her, to shelter her from
her needs. “I want you,” she says, still,
as I hold her. “Here I am,” I say, still,
and she wants a story to fill the
empty spot somewhere that she feels like an
ache in a tooth with her tongue.
My daughter sleeps. I fight the peace offered me
tonight, more at home in my despair than in salvation,
than in a story of passion I find becoming
increasingly my own.
Christ went to a certain place
to pray,
says Luke, who wasn’t there
when the Lord’s prayer
spoke itself in shivers
of intention.
I read it this way: that Christ was certain,
possessing a calm knowledge
that bread would be
delivered daily, and broken,
and that names would be held holy
on the tongue,
spoken only at moments of
passion and passage.
How certain, I wonder, did the
cross feel, rough cut, slivered
and notched as he humped it
to a certain place
that held no secret, only
humiliation and public hanging,
shouting his abandonment
to the lowland traffic?
In his doubt I find
my certainty.
I sense, finally,
a biography.
by Paul Totah