Jake Marmer, Adeena Karasick, Hank Lazer & Alicia Jo Rabins
In this collaborative poem, each poet uses the verse from the book of Yonah 2:10 as inspiration and bases his or her writing on the final line of the previous stanza.
“But I, with loud thanksgiving/Will sacrifice to You.” Yonah: 2:10
my offering: while everyone but
I with loud thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you
a slice
of their morning
will consecrate to you
a you, a shape, a turn
back to some beginning
I’ll tithe a piece of my resounding
nothing
but
will make it the best nothing I’ve got –
’cause I am adrift in the dew of shattered
letters; your veils, vortexts, engraved upon me
storming through syntactic
chaos, a chaosmos. And I am bathed in contingency
rhapsodically raging in the shards
of shadowed mapping where my locus
in logos, in language that swallows itself
silent, salient, beckoning
kadosh kadosh the thanks i give
for living in this world for your
deliverance of me for my return
i see now that all live within
a cave within the belly of a great fish
& few will ever call upon you to be
delivered into the full holiness of being here
& my loud thanksgiving this life of thinking
vision writing is no sacrifice at all
but the steady calling in your name to all our kin
For three days and three nights I was in darkness.
All I heard was this steady calling in your name,
a kind of breathing, an organ music echoing
off the flying buttresses of my underwater cathedral.
Oh fish, my prison, my body, my boat,
you carry me through salt water. I know how this works.
When I am ready, you cough me out.
When I am no longer myself, you deposit me
and I offer loud thanksgiving on the shore.