Alef: Seeding the Alphabet

The Yoke of Heaven

Shoulder your sacks of barley and plans,

your burden lifts as you walk.

No need to know who beckons.

Stir any of God’s seventy names

until hummingbirds thrum in your throat.

Skim creeks and honeyed meadows,

then climb a dry plateau to your beginning:

a fallow field, unplowed.

Seeding an Alphabet

To invent the alef-beit,

decipher the grammar of crows,

read a tangle of bare branches

with vowels of the last leaves

scrawling their jittery speech

on the sky’s pale page.

Choose a beginning.

See what God yields and dirt cedes

when tines disturb fescue, vetch, and sage,

when your hand dips grain from a sack,

scattering it among engraved furrows.

Beyond the hill, a plume of dust

where oxen track the hours.

Does God lead or follow or scout?

To answer, count to one again and again:

a red maple leaf and a yellow maple leaf

that wind rifles, rain shines until they let go,

blazing their scripted nothingness on air.