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Poet Lynn Powell explores the theme of "Harvest" from Job 38:25-28.
Job 38:25-28
At the Equinox
By
Lynn Powell
Credits:
Curated by:
Emily Ruth Hazel
2013
Poetry
Primary Scripture
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I have always found odd comfort in the Voice from the Whirlwind's answer to Job's anguished questions about human suffering. Instead of answering Job on his own human terms, the Lord flings out fierce, exquisite questions, asserting the vastness, mystery, and unfathomable complexity of creation. Humanity is hardly mentioned in the litany of creation's scope and wonder, ferocity and beauty. It's that cosmic perspective I find, in my most receptive moments, thrilling and calming and liberating, both as a person and as an artist.
In this little poem, I try to evoke the orders of magnitude of creation, which continues within and around and through us in countless, inventive ways. As a poet, I "work the dark with rigs of silk," and am grateful for the little galaxies that occasionally condense, for a while, on those thin lines.
Spark Notes
The Artist's Reflection
Lynn Powell is the author of two books of poetry, Old & New Testamentsand The Zones of Paradise, and a book of nonfiction, Framing Innocence: A Mother’s Photographs, a Prosecutor’s Zeal, and a Small Town’s Response. Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, the Studs and Ida Terkel Award from The New Press, and the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. Her poems have been published in many magazines, including Poetry, FIELD, Image, Tiferet, and The Paris Review, and have been anthologized in 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Everyday and The Norton Introduction to Literature. Poems from her current book-in-progress, A Scherzo for Sadness,are forthcoming this fall in Shenandoah and The Georgia Review. A native of East Tennessee, she has lived with her family in Oberlin, Ohio, since 1990.
Lynn Powell
About the Artist
Lynn Powell
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For a little while after the fog lifts,
the autumn field flashes with sudden flowers‚
like filigrees of mirror, like alloys of lace and light.
AT THE EQUINOX
by Lynn Powell
Has the rain a father, or who has begotten the drops of dew?
-Job 38:28
For a little while after the fog lifts,
the autumn field flashes with sudden flowers-
like filigrees of mirror, like alloys of lace and light.
A weird miracle? Some manic, brilliant manna?
-until, of course, it's spiders-ten thousand
that have worked the dark with rigs of silk
to snag a fly and then, surprising themselves,
have step-fathered the dew.
And so, for an odd hour, their creations
glisten like galaxies,
sieved from a passing thought of lake and air.
Loading Video . . .
For a little while after the fog lifts,
the autumn field flashes with sudden flowers‚
like filigrees of mirror, like alloys of lace and light.
