<Prompt 15: Take the phrase “What _____,” fill in the blank, and use it as the title of the poem>  I am stuck on this initiation-poem track.  I guess that’s not a bad thing.  This one’s not so much about a fairy tale, but is connected to a story that I have always found compelling.  Jacob, the main character, is a greedy, self-aggrandizing, conniving, megalomaniac scoundrel.  He’s had his lovely epiphanies, and still he hasn’t changed.  I don’t actually like him very much, but that’s okay.  Sometimes I don’t like me very much either.

He is on the run from his furious brother–who has every right in the world to be seeking vengeance, and one night, all alone, finds himself suddenly wrestling with a stranger in the dark.  The stranger realizes he cannot overpower Jacob, so he knocks Jacob’s thigh out of joint.  Jacob still won’t let his adversary go–“Not until you bless me!”  What is it with this guy and his demand for blessings?  His brother wants him dead because Jacob stole his own family birthright blessing, and now here he is, out in the wilderness, wrestling with a stranger for a blessing.  I sort of like the gall of that.

Yes, the stranger blessed him in the end, gave him a whole new name.  No, it didn’t seem to change him much.  He continued to be rascally and greedy, and he passed on the family curse of favoritism to his own 12 sons.

 

This time it wasn’t angels riding
up and down their golden escalator.
No happy hallelujahs,
no floodgates of heaven
opening for my vision alone.

This time the angel took on gravity,
grabbed and held me,
wrestled me to the ground.

The angel’s grip was like steel,
like iron, like feathers, ice cold air.
But I’ve been running my whole life.
I wasn’t about to let some angel
keep me from getting away
and getting my way.

I have been limping ever since,
from the touch on my thigh,
but still I wouldn’t let the angel go.

“Not until you bless me.
Not until you tell me,
until you tell me my name.”

And here I am,
building altars in the dawn,
and tasting those new sounds
in my throat, on my lips.

Gratitude List:
1.  Harvesting potatoes and carrots today with an earnest and energetic bunch of third graders from the Waldorf School.
2.  Hot showers
3.  Going down to Columbia town to shop with my sweetie.  How many years has it been since we two have gone off somewhere to run errands?  It was almost like a date.
4.  There’s a murmuration in the hollow.
5.  A gentle family ceremony for the burial of a little red hen.  We buried her in a nest of dried grasses with a handful of feed and the bright shiny quartzite I found in the potato patch today.  The starlings kept flying through the trees with a wheep and a whoosh, and the near-full moon rose high.

Blessings on the Roots.