POEM #22: Kneel and Drink From the Pools Of Yah
a new version of psalm 104
Well, I have a total love for psalm 104, the psalm of creation—as I know many of us do!
So I’ve been wanting to do this one for awhile, and it was indeed a joy to work on. Right away—literally the first word—I encountered such an expansive roadblock: bāraḵ, “bless.”
Oh man! Of the typical religious words in English, “bless” is perhaps the most empty of imaginable content—at least for me, anyway! When people say “bless you,” “bless the Lord”," “blessed is the man” and so on, it’s just an internal blank stare for me: I don’t know what it means!
It does have a nice sound, though—bless, bless—like wind going through the grass. And that’s all it is for me, a sort of ambient onomatopoeia reminding me of the grass when I’m in spiritual environments that lack it.
But, as you know, one of the main ideas of doing these psalms versions is to open up space for striking mental images to flow inward with every word. And for this, I rely almost entirely on Jeff Benner’s catastrophically amazing Ancient Hebrew Lexicon of the Bible, which dives deeply into the word-pictures remembered inside the roots of the Hebrew words.
And Benner says that bāraḵ comes from a root meaning “to kneel,” in the sense of “bending at the knee to get a drink from a pond or present a gift.” Oh man! I love the thought that in the ancient world, there were still drinkable ponds, and also that the posture for accepting such a gift from the Lord of Creation was the same as offering a gift to someone else!
So, that was the first step toward the first verse of the psalm becoming this: “Kneel and drink from the pools of Yah, O my inmost breath!”
And the rest of the psalm sparkles pretty hard, too, if I do say so myself—and I do say so, because to praise the vividness of this version (to the extent that it’s successful and faithful, and of course it’s not perfect) is to praise the vividness of the Hebrew, and the deep poetic feeling and attentiveness to nature of whoever first wrote—and also Yah, who gave us language in the first place, and a beautiful world very much worthy of our use of beautiful language to praise it (the Hebrew word for praise, by the way, was originally a pictogram of a man lifting his hands up toward a shining star, in awe).
A few final notes before the psalm »
The Hebrew word for “stork” is ḥăsîḏâ , which refers to the bowing of her long neck—so she becomes a good Hasidic Jew in the psalm.
Speaking of animals, I learned a totally new English word in doing this version. Try to guess which one, it’s lovely!
Also, can you find the cirrus clouds? And the sun?
At the end, since Benner says tāmam means primarily “to be made whole, to be free of wound or injury” and only secondarily “consumed,” I've taken the liberty to see the phrase yitammu hattaim as something more empathetic, albeit more hippie, than the typical call to “let sinners be consumed from the earth.”
Psalm’s below the paywall. I hope it finds you well!
love,
-graham