Sample Poems by Marjorie Maddox
How to Fit God into a Poem
Part I
Read him.
Break him into stanzas.
Give him a pet albatross
and a bon voyage party.
Glue archetypes on his wings with Elmers,
or watch as he soars past the Slough of Despond
in a DC-10.
Draw wrinkles on his brow with eyeliner
until his beard turns as white as forgiven sin.
Explicate him.
Call him “Love.”
Translate him into Norwegian.
Examine original manuscripts
for proof of his kinship to Shakespeare.
Make him rhyme,
Cram him into iambic pentameter.
Let him read War and Peace ten times
and give a book report to third graders.
Edit out references to sin
and insert miracles.
Award him a Nobel Prize.
Then, after you’ve published him annually
in The New Yorker for thirty years,
crucify him. Proclaim it a suicide.
Part II
Let him whirl through your veins
like a hurricane
until your cells gyrate,
until you salivate at the sound of his breath.
Let him bristle your nerves like cat hairs
and laminate your limbs.
On All Saints’ Day, meditate
and wait patiently.
Then, he will come,
then, he will twist your tongue,
pucker your skin,
spew out his life on the page.
God in the Suburbs
Once, I saw your hands
sixty feet above the stop sign at Park and Oak,
your fingers pushed through the clouds like airplane wings,
your nails thrice the size of ostrich eggs and clean.
It was Simmons up—“First Bounce or Fly.”
He’d kicked a wild one, straight up and up.
A prayer gasped, I staggered here, there,
one foot out, then the other, and grasped at air with my arms.
For eight seconds, you kept the ball at your fingertips,
counting our sins on an abacus,
searching for crosses round our necks.
I’d left mine at home on the dresser but so had the others.
It was that last second that you spotted me:
Band-Aid elbows pointed out, nose dirty.
You took pity with a straight pitch.
Simmons was surprised.
God Trick-or-Treating
You dressed like a clown and surprised us all,
wobbling in your size-twelve shoes, across front lawns
toward Seventh Street and back.
Twice you snorted jokes through your Rudolph nose
(How many heathen does it take to screw in a light bulb? . . . )
and set our stomachs twitching.
That night I liked you lots:
your cheeks puffing with popcorn balls,
your lips smacking on apples,
your fingers stiff from doorbell-poking.
Ten minutes ’til curfew, you collected our Woolco sacks
and multiplied them like fishes.
God and Hide-and-Go-Seek
I. You’re It
At midnight you crouched behind a burning bush
inside an ark cluttered with hippopotami
and, counting to seven like a blast of Jericho trumpets,
you stalled with “seven and one-half, seven and two-thirds,
seven and three-fourths, seven and four-fifths,”
until all but the untied shoelace of my left sneaker
slid beneath my bed.
Blaring, “Ready or not, here I come” at ten-minute intervals,
you feigned an all-out search by separating bulrushes,
rolling stones away from tombs, dissecting whale stomachs,
and finally found me, middle-aged, with a mustache of dust.
II. I’m It
Crossing my fingers like twisted pretzels,
I prayed you’d stay in the vicinity or at least the U.S.
and not hopscotch across the ocean on some unpronounceable islands.
For three seconds, I trusted you:
counting with whole numbers, squeezing my eyes to the size
of almonds
and the darkness of basements at night,
hoping you’d fold up in a drawer
or stack yourself noisily near the records.
Instead, as in The King James, you left “straightaway,”
leaving the front door open, your saltwater footprints on the porch.
It was months before I found you
disguised as a layman
in the third pew of the Old North.
God Goes Fishing
Bamboo stick and he flicks his wrist,
swings the line across continents.
I can hear it swish, slice clouds.
It goes wherever there’s water.
Its hook dangles from the slide at the city pool,
claws at sewer caps, attacks a fireman’s hose.
In the morning, I find it
clipped to the soap dish in my shower:
question mark glistening steam.
I am too busy getting clean to answer.
God on a Tightrope
One pierced foot before the other,
you step from your ivory platform,
curl your toes about the taut wire
as if walking on water.
You balance the air on your arms,
tent shadows on your shoulders.
Spotlights circle your brow like a crown.
In your star-spangled loincloth,
you hover over the multitude,
make the sign of the cross,
take a deep bow,
then dive toward our gaping mouths.