Jonah
Jill Hammer
Jill Hammer is Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion, and Director of Learning and Ritual at Beit Kohenet, a house of mystical, earth-based, feminist Jewish seeking.
1.
I didn’t ask to be born in a cruel time.
My attitudes are not my fault.
There isn’t enough
to go around— enough love, enough food, enough truth—
and those who might be wise enough
to steer this conflicted orb
are also wise enough to stay away
from the flailing masses.
If some city somewhere is sinning, it’s the same
as any other city in the world.
Its cry might as well be the cry
of a man dropped into the ocean,
a cry none of humankind can hear.
If I provoke my maker,
how much worse can I be
than my next door neighbor?
If I flee my destiny,
why would God bother to rise
from the era’s vast lassitude
to hunt me down?
The cosmos stinks;
my soul fogs in the stench of it.
The whole place might as well be
the belly of a whale.
2.
Washed onto the shore,
I twist like so much driftwood,
remembering living eelish dark
and the moan-songs I heard
in the temple of the secret deep.
Alone down there, star in a body-ocean.
Alone down there, flesh-buried treasure,
feeling the pulse of not-alone,
life imbedded in life like a splinter,
my ignorance
wailing between my ears
like a ram’s horn.
I vomit up seawater
and what I learned.
Sun fires my eyes.
Someone I don’t know,
some Ninevite, a sinner,
takes out a tablecloth from her basket
and covers me.
Some other sinner
feeds me and gives me water.
My life is saved. I go into the city
to proclaim its destruction.
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3.
All the words have been said.
I don’t believe the hype,
don’t accept apologies.
In my little hut,
I wait for smoke to rise
over Nineveh.
Somewhere behind stone walls,
a king sits in ashes.
A bull wanders in sackcloth.
The withered gourd whispers.
I think it may be God.
The dying plant
spits its seeds at me,
howling:
“Don’t you know me?
I sheltered you
even in your selfishness.
No one can tell their right hand
from their left.
I have to begin somewhere.”
I have to begin somewhere.
I no longer have wax in my ears. I hear whalesong.
My life is saved. I go into the city.
