POEM #15: The Weeping of My Eyes Has Been My Only Feast

a new version of psalm 42

Banias [Pan's] spring flowing from the base of Mount Hermon, a major source of water for the Jordan. Possibly the site at which, or at least about which, the original psalm was composed? (In the psalm, these geographical features are all mentioned, and in a way suggestive of the waterfalls at the spring’s end; in my version they're hidden behind their literal names).

The poet Andrew Mandell of

Bog-down and Aster

wrote beautifully of his recent encounter with a deer, simultaneously also an encounter with the messiah within. I was thinking about this work of his as I was working on this psalm today, and I hope he recognizes something in it—as is my wish for all of you, too!

…Even though—or perhaps especially—because it takes some risks, for example: This morning I came up to the word yᵉshûwʻâh, a feminine noun whose root means “shepherd,” and is often translated as health, victory, deliverance, or especially salvation—in the very practical sense of a shepherd's watchful love for his sheep (he rescues them from predators, disease, and injury; he leads them to flourishing meadows of grass), and since that Hebrew word is the messiah's given name, also, I was curious about what might happen if, instead of translating or paraphrasing it, I left it as yeshua—what new reverberations might ripple out, if allowed to strike such an anachronistic and cross-linguistic bell?

That perhaps Christianizes the psalm—sort of (not really). But I invite anybody who might worry about that to worry even more about the extent to which I've paganized the psalm—if by “paganism” is meant seeing the Divine in the concrete forms of nature, tree, waterfall, stone, breeze, and so on—which are some of the many vivid and almost tangible natural images for God coming through it, via its original Hebrew roots.

So ultimately, I don't see this wild, mossy version of psalm 42 so much Christian as post-Christian—a song for those of us who know, deeply, what the Meaning Crisis feels like, desolate of any easy answers, but knowing, or at least hoping, in our heart of hearts, that our bodies could never truly forget the One who made them—or, indeed, vice versa.

love,

-graham