Canter Bridge

Writing his poetry while seated on ash and blood, the writer of the biblical book of Lamentations finds just the syllables for his poignant scream:

He has made my teeth grind on gravel,
and made me cower in ashes;
my soul is bereft of peace;
I have forgotten what happiness is;
so I say, ‘Gone is my glory,
and all that I had hoped for from the LORD.’

The thought of my affliction and my homelessness
is wormwood and gall!
My soul continually thinks of it
and is bowed down within me.

One wonders how many millions of readers—each placed in a moment as real and significant as that of the poet who lamented Zion’s devastation—have found in such stark realism the descriptors of their own loss, the vocabulary of their bereft agony.

This would be enough to justify these poems, for we borrow words most needily when our throat chokes up and the words we thought we knew remain stuck in our lungs.

Yet if the Bible’s poetic mourner will weep most truly he will not weep forever. Even here in this undeniable melee of blood and ash where happiness would be the only absurd thing, hope’s green shoot appears in rubble’s dead crevice:

But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
‘The LORD is my portion,’ says my soul,
‘therefore I will hope in him.’

Hope finds a voice where happiness would be a curse. The biblical poet knows too truly to confuse the two.

He knows as well that hope, if it is to be sustained, if it is to grow, if it is to become something other than devastation’s next, taunting chapter, requires of its suffering companion the resolution to wait, to seek, to hold fast. Despair, not grief, is hope’s mortal adversary.

The LORD is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul that seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the LORD.
It is good for one to bear
the yoke in youth,
to sit alone in silence
when the Lord has imposed it,
to put one’s mouth to the dust
(there may yet be hope),
to give one’s cheek to the smiter,
and be filled with insults.

For the Lord will not
reject forever.
Although he causes grief, he will have compassion
according to the abundance of his steadfast love;
for he does not willingly afflict
or grieve anyone.

YHWH, we read against all easy theologies, causes grief.

Yet he does not do so, the Hebrew turn of phrase claims on our behalf, ‘from the heart’. It is his strange work, performed with a divine grimace. It is a pathway through the boneyard, friendly signs posted along the way urging the traveler ‘Don’t stop here. Walk on, to the meadow.’

The bones are real, monuments of lives snuffed out, of death’s triumph, of hope’s ridiculous allegations of better things. The meadow may not exist, may be the most painful trick, a mirage, a lie.

The wounded heart claims as much, insists that there are only more bones, that paths like this one lead nowhere.

That, not its opposite, is the lie. The poet weeps, yet he waits. Yet he walks.