Hello all,
An Overness continues, with Aaron’s epic, part 7. I’m thinking there will be at least 1 or 2 more parts to Aaron’s epic, and then we’ll continue on into the rest of the story of the Bible. Here’s what I’m riffing on, in this poem:
Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife, for he had married a Cushite. “Has the LORD spoken only through Moses?” they asked. “Hasn’t he also spoken through us?” And the LORD heard this.
(Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.)
At once the LORD said to Moses, Aaron and Miriam, “Come out to the tent of meeting, all three of you.” So the three of them went out. Then the LORD came down in a pillar of cloud; he stood at the entrance to the tent and summoned Aaron and Miriam. When the two of them stepped forward, he said, “Listen to my words:
When there is a prophet among you,
I, the LORD, reveal myself to them in visions,
I speak to them in dreams.
But this is not true of my servant Moses;
he is faithful in all my house.
With him I speak face to face,
clearly and not in riddles;
he sees the form of the LORD.
Why then were you not afraid
to speak against my servant Moses?”
The anger of the LORD burned against them, and he left them.
When the cloud lifted from above the tent, Miriam’s skin was leprous—it became as white as snow. Aaron turned toward her and saw that she had a defiling skin disease, and he said to Moses, “Please, my lord, I ask you not to hold against us the sin we have so foolishly committed. Do not let her be like a stillborn infant coming from its mother’s womb with its flesh half eaten away.”
So Moses cried out to the LORD, “Please, God, heal her!”
The LORD replied to Moses, “If her father had spit in her face, would she not have been in disgrace for seven days? Confine her outside the camp for seven days; after that she can be brought back.” So Miriam was confined outside the camp for seven days, and the people did not move on till she was brought back.
Numbers 12:1-15
Here’s my poem. From Aaron’s perspective. The morning after this encounter in Numbers 12~
VII. I rise as did the cloud, dress in haste as on that day. Blood-stench hovers overhead and shattered clay pots disturb every step, the Sea gaping before us —No, only a dream. I am walking, true, at first light (she must have slept out under heaven). The camp sleeps but for the doelings who stomp and wail at my approach. Salt fills the air like a false prophecy— to rise with the incense? To accompany the blade? Without her songs to bear the story, my sweat-stiff robes become the sound of guilt alone.
Poem Notes:
The intensive I recently took with Scott Cairns has me thinking about form in some new ways. It’s not that this poem has a particular or historical form (like a sonnet or a sestina, etc) but that the stanza or strophe breaks need to serve much more of a purpose to me now. So having two couplets on either side of a central tercet seemed right to me for this one. I used to divide stanzas more along thought divisions as well as the aesthetic appeal. But now, I see more. I see the couplets on either side as if they represent this brother-sister duo and the tercet in the middle as the chiastic middle that has that italicized aside as yet a further middle. And it’s in that chiastic middle that the heart bleeds through—Aaron realizes what was dream and was reality. He finds himself walking towards his priestly tasks. He is thinking of his sister. The small animals of the camp are afraid of him and perhaps welcome him, too, those that are unaware of his duty to slaughter them eventually.
This seems like the center of the poem to me. But then the turn towards the salt imagery. What did y’all think of that? It seemed essential, but certainly raises some questions.
Further up & further in,
Anna
p.s. Here’s that other endeavor I mentioned, if you’re interested:
