From 99 Psalms
Translated from the German by Mark S. Burrows
[13]
lord
pray
pray aloud against the clamor of the human hand
that seeks to drown you out
and appear on quiet soles
so that we might understand your footsteps
strive
to acknowledge our prayers
even when they appear in some other guise
for no prayer ever unbinds itself from its origins
with the one who prays
[14]
lord
take up the speech
by which i pray to you
grant me the gestures
that have grown within me in your absence
that i might remain true to my incorrigible nature
and take up your weakness
[22]
lord
keep on wandering forever and never
settle down
because no dwelling places remain
only footsteps
be loud and urgent
share in my life and my passions
accompany me
all the way to your bread
so that my word might wake
[25]
lord
stay with me
even when i nourish myself from ashes and salt
be still and listen to each of the names
i lend you
for i want to distinguish you from the false gods
give me patience to endure the vain
with their empty words
and the converts
who strive to confirm their opposite
and make
my waiting full of revolt
lord
when you arrive
we’ll be light
bread and water
the table is set and the door ajar
come and be seated among us
free me of the belief
that you’re only faithful from a distance
and speak with me
in the unharried speech of animals
who watch us from afar
with their unadulterated hunger
Occasionally, over the years, I’ve puzzled over the use of imperatives. “Come, Lord . . . ,” “Speak, Lord . . . ,” “Answer me . . . ,” “Incline your ear . . . ,” “Open my lips . . . ,” “Show me . . . ,” “Teach me . . . ,” and so on. The Psalms are full of them—outcries, often, or sometimes exuberant invitations. “Imperative” is, after all, a grammatical term, not necessarily a peremptory attitude or posture. Still, sometimes it seems as though there’s something a little presumptuous about directing or demanding God’s attention.
The imperatives in SAID’s short psalms push the envelope. The poet, an Iranian who immigrated to Germany as an engineering student and remained to become one of Germany’s most noted contemporary poets, challenges readers on several counts. His collection of 99 psalms, one reviewer pointed out, invites “adherents of at least three Abrahamic religions to begin creating a bridge across their divides.”*
Asking God to “pray,“ to “appear” on the soles of feet, to exert himself on our behalf, and later to “be still and listen” seems pushy and irreverent. The first time I read this series of poems, I almost laid them aside, but their candor, intimacy, and odd shifts of perspective tugged me back. The speaker is compelling, in more than one sense: these psalms dare us, as some of the biblical psalms do, to participate in prayer that refuses to soften the hard edges of faith. They reiterate the audacity and humility of the man who begged Jesus to heal his son, crying at the same time, “I believe; help my unbelief!” They confess doubt; they insist; they announce ongoing impatience with self-satisfied zealots and people who are all talk. Yet their impertinences throw into high relief a sturdy, rough-edged humility, an urgency, a hunger, not just for bread (though the speaker might well be an unhoused person whose belly is empty) but for a real, satisfying, meaty righteousness.
The images in the poems appear a little ad hoc, as though occurring to the speaker in the course of praying. Each line seems, in its way, a restart after a tentative and uncertain pause. After the one-word line “pray,” for example, he seems to consider how: “aloud against the clamor of the human hand. . . .” Not the human mouth or voice, but the hand, which we have to imagine with instruments or tools or weapons of war—the noise of manufacture and technology and wanton destruction. Then, against that loudness comes the appeal to “appear on quiet soles.” Then, later, to lead me, not exactly “in paths of righteousness,” but “all the way to your bread”—a petition made boldly undiplomatic by raw need—and all that way to “stay with me” and “be still.”
The prayers are full of the self-interest of one who is hell-bent on survival—spiritual as well as physical, as though the two are inseparable. The speaker is aware that survival is a struggle—that one’s hold on it may be tenuous; that doubts assail and dread threatens defeat; that we may, in the process, be devoured. In the Narnia books that C. S. Lewis wrote for children, the lion Aslan represents divine presence and protection, but is never predictable or tame. When a child asks if Aslan is “safe,” she receives this not wholly reassuring reply: “Safe? . . . Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the king, I tell you.” The lord who speaks from afar in the “unharried speech of animals/ who watch us from afar / with their unadulterated hunger” may, like those animals, embody both power and innocence beyond our understanding, and love that eludes human comprehension.
These prayers venture into the wild spaces where such Beings dwell—unknown and unknowable beyond a scattering of facts and centuries of speculation, yet able to be reached by whatever words arise from the yearning of the human heart. This God, the prayers attest, will not despise “a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart.” Nor, the speaker apparently believes, the tough and troubled love learned on street corners and in depths of a despair only God can plumb.
*. See www.bobcornwall.com.2013/10/99-psalms-said-review.html.