Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani

Author:Chris Abani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

LEATHER

This Bible is heavy with vengeance.

Not because its pages chart the path

of the wrathful God of a wrathful people.

But because Father beat us

with its tooled leather-bound weight.

This was the genesis of the smoke,

the retaliation of burning psalms.

We wanted to hold Father accountable

but power is a conceit revealing our limits.

What wounds us makes us complicit.

And so we smoked Father’s Bible.

Page by torn page folded into the origami

of an adolescent rebellion.

All these pages inhaled,

the holy evocative power of words and we

remained silly children bound by our fears.

Maybe this is the slippage, when we wonder

how God lets it happen. How a man can

delight in a woman’s unbridled joy

then rip it to shreds to keep her from having it.

The mind is deceitful above all things.

It will lie to you in the fragility of paper,

rolled and filled with thyme and lit.

I have seen a tropical storm race

across a savannah like stampeding buffalo,

sheets of rain kicking dust and fear into a haze,

seen a white pigeon unable to fly from a cross,

held in perpetual flutter by the slipstream,

a white flag signaling defeat.

In the end, Brother, we are that pigeon

held in pointless flapping

to a parent oblivious of the love we suffer for.

In a dream, I answered a voiceless call from Father,

wondering what seeks conversation with a ghost.

I will write an elegy on a white sheet of paper,

roll it up and ignite it, watch that burnt offering

ascend to him on a ladder of smoke.

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