Some Preliminary Notes to “An Attempt" Andy Brumer
Like so many, the horror of the events in the Middle East of these past two-plus weeks has shocked, enraged, and confused me to the point of needing to sort it out for the sake of preserving my sanity. To that end I found myself asking why, in such an ostensibly “religious” conflict, constructed and construed amongst essentially ethnic brothers and sisters, there has been no attempt that I’ve run across in the mainstream media to discuss this conflict within a religious context? After all, the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, all share the same God of the Hebrew Scripture, and Yahweh, as that text refers to “him" has ONE requirement and formula for happiness and peace on earth: follow his Commandments and Laws. Break any one of them, and this by now avowedly vindictive God would, without exception, kill any and all transgressors.
“An Attempt” references an exception, taken from Exodus 17. There, rather than killing Moses for disobeying God’s command that he speak to a rock to coax water out of it rather than strike it as he did to achieve the same end, creating the impression that the minor miracle was Moses’ doing, God forbade Moses from entering the Promised Land. This even though he had led the Israelites there after wandering through the desert for forty years. Today, perhaps, God is also punishing Jews and Muslims alike for their bad behavior. This is a poem, and poems are by their nature naive and unrealistic. But the anger, the despair, the frustration behind it is very real.
— Andy Brumer, Pasadena, CA, October, 2023
Pacecco de Rosa, “The Massacre of the Innocents,” ca. 1640, oil on canvas, 78 x 120 1/4”.
Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Phildelphia.
An Attempt
This One God
of three faiths
hates
half of them,
ok, let’s say
two thirds.
Might this
not be construed
in any other
way than
absurd?
Or is this Uni-God
unequivocally
confused-
melding
everyone together
into a
question he
can’t ask:
“Aren’t they all
human beings?”
So from his
home of Cloud
through the impossible thinking
that
frames it,
God can’t
figure out
who doesn’t
love him
enough,
or did something
wrong enough
like Moses hitting a rock
with a stick
that left him dying
all alone
across the river
from
the Promised land.
“Ah, I’ll kill
them all,” God
can’t seem to conclude
otherwise.
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