Antiphons
Poet Joshua Robbins casts lines to God
POET’S NOTE
Outside of the Christian poem, there is an emerging and injurious suspicion of the imagination and the capability of the image to reveal anything transcendent. The very word “image” and its poetic deployment are linked to an inconspicuous intellectual shallowness, artistic laziness, and even deception.
In her essay “The Christian Imagination,” theologian Janine Langan describes the “de-Christianizing pressure” the Christian poet faces in our poetic culture. Although poetry generally has never been “so blatantly disconnected from transcendence,” Christian poetry has an opportunity to refashion imagining as an act of hope and faith. This new imaginative vision would be eucharistic in its ability to reveal God. The Christian poet wrestling with one’s faith, should, therefore, continue to believe in the image and language’s ability to point toward the transcendent other. And yet, as Langan somewhat painfully states, the Christian imagination also needs a reality check and must “face the reality of Job’s cry, the cry of God’s crucifixion, and of our participation in it.”
For the Christian poet, this means our imagining must wrestle with faith head-on and we must engage in a process that “seek[s] God within the wounds that reality inflicts.” These wounds are not private and so their representation in image and language ought not be private either. Additionally, the Christian poet should be cognizant of the fact that their representation of the world, if it is a true creation of the Christian imagination, is something new, which means there is an imperative for Christian poetry to embed itself in social context and the public sphere.
No matter how traumatic the suffering inflicted by the world on the world is, the world’s shards and debris can be salvaged, reclaimed, and assembled into art, so long as our process and movement toward faith does not separate these physical facts from spiritual reality.
The poems gathered here include poems from Praise Nothing (University of Arkansas Press, 2013) and poems from a new manuscript, “Antiphons,” which liberally follows traditional antiphonal structures as performed in the Divine Liturgy of the early Church. Each poetic pair presents, first, a human reaction to the Problem of Suffering. Each subsequent italicized poem, or antiphon, is a response voiced by God.
—Joshua Robbins, April 2021
Theodicy
Predestined for the warehouses
of the snow, cold sweeps east
across the asphalt, the darkening suburbs.
I think of Job and wonder
if God ever really returned
to business. After He’d consented
to boils and crushed livestock,
servants’ and children’s throats slit,
after ash, maybe one still afternoon
God raised both hands above His head
as if to say, “I’ve had enough,”
and renounced all of it,
took a job behind a desk
wearing khaki-colored scrubs,
filing papers to code and answering
the phones, His voice far away,
uninterested, yet familiar
to those desperate on the other end
of the line. If it were you
fidgeting in the waiting room
you’d not even notice Him.
Just north past the ridgeline’s barren
pin oaks, I watch in the rearview
as the office park’s cold silhouette
dissolves into the outskirts
of suburban sprawl. If God is with us,
then maybe He lives around here, too,
some duplex on a loop or a single
apartment with a satellite dish. Maybe
right now God is, like us,
commuting across town toward home,
or headed from work to the store, or maybe
He’s just driving, His window cracked
to feel the cold as the sun descends,
while the rest of us pull into our driveways,
jangle our keys at the front door, and try
to keep on believing, even as we
lock it behind us and turn out the light.
Against Forgiveness
In this life, nothing
need be forgiven. Not
the streetlights’ high murmur
or the rattle of shopping carts
windblown across the parking lot.
Not the skir of asphalt
worn to gravel. For what
could be better? This slow
fade of sidewalk weeds
the sky’s dingy light
spread like a rag over the faux-
terracotta roof tiles
of the strip-mall liquor store,
its sad neon wink,
its inventory of forgetting.
Outside, a boy with spiked hair
and choke-chain collar waits
for a buyer, and none of it
calling anything into question.
So what is this need you have
to ask why you still
can’t remember the name
of a lover you had once who could only
come in the backseat of your car,
who knew then that whatever
your thoughts of heaven
by now they’d be long
unutterable. Go ahead.
Take the money. No need
to remember. Buy him a fifth
of whatever’s cheap. Pocket
the change and keep walking.
Field Guide to the Second Coming
It will be sudden and flash
like bottle shards or like morning
fracturing against the horizon’s
edge of strip-mall rooftops
and be a comfort and turn a few
bucks into fistfuls of ordinary
joy expanding in the capillaries
of whoever no longer desires
to sleep there between buildings
as traffic picks up beneath
the telephone wires’ high operatics
and it will sing, of course, and be
sung by the gravel-throated
hallelujahs of dumpsters raised up
and emptied into the truck’s dark
which could be something like
a metaphor for grace though nothing
is new here under the sun
beating down in mid-April
where no one is looking for the infinite
and the endlessness one imagines
must come after death
seems like nothing more
than a voice in the void, a strike
of the heel, an empty tomb.
Prayer with Rotohammer and Stained Glass
Let my worship
be this work
And the force
of each bit-strike
On masonry.
Forswear my doubtful
Tongue. Let
my past
Words be
what they are:
Failed elegies
to the living word.
Let praise
be pain rejoicing.
What rose
like dust
Now falls
and it is beautiful
And meaningless
and out of time.
Say you won’t
let me go.
In the darkness
I close my eyes.
Nothing vanishes:
clumsy life,
Crowded street,
the perfect I thought
Could not take
me back
For want of it.
Truth: all remaining
Choices are
as enormous
As what feels
hardly enough
To make me
whole. When light
Breaks through
darkened stained
Glass, no pane
can know itself
Without the other
panes. What
I’ve bargained
away I can’t
Explain in words.
When a stone
Is hammered,
the form of what’s
Broken becomes
another form.
yers through a glass darkly ain’t
prayer I gave you damn near
everything speech slit throats ash
millennia its endless teeth conflagrations I ain’t
lying ain’t gonna be me lying
face down at the end there’s still
so far to go for no good reason
you’ll know it when you see it I would
point it out don’t turn away like me
you still don’t know why I made you
Declining the Angel
On the turn lane median between CVS and Jack in the Box,
he watches for the traffic signal’s turn. In his box:
Green crosses and hand-woven rosettes, palm-
sized angels twisted into shape from plucked palm
Fronds. A few commuters waive small bills held
out the driver’s side. Most just wait on green. I held
The man for nothing in my arms, I think, and drop ashtray change
into his hand. I decline the angel. “Keep the change,”
I mutter—mindless quip—which is why the meek shall “Eat the Rich.”
From the backseat, I hear, “Daddy, we did that because we’re rich,”
And before I can launch my pious litany about why the new
insurance won’t pay Mom’s labs, the bills stacking up, how the new
Light-up shoes he’s so damn proud of were gifted secondhand,
we pull forward. “Bye, sir,” he smiles, waving his two empty hands.
ain’t words enough to explain
my silence some trope like water something
unbreakable or a myth perhaps a cage
a voice in a jar a lightning flash or mirrored
smoke see the stranger’s eye regret
even what it leaves behind that rush
on certain afternoons light textured
on brick buildings long vacant then
sudden hardhats machinery scaffolding
reaching up plans you assume
The burden of these poems is Faith, once held, now endlessly longed for and endlessly eluding. This is our late American moment, the moment of asphalt and strip malls, of identical subdivisions and office parks, of convenience stores and chain-link fences, junkies and missing girls and bodies coughed up in the shadows of warehouses…Robbins stares straight into the sun and doesn't flinch, and yet…manages to find brief moments of beauty in terror and desolation. We are all the better for his hard truths.
—Susan Wood, author of The Book of Ten
