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The Babylonian Exile
At first it cut much quicker to the bone:
The loss of all, our world brought to the brink.
But by and by you slowly start to think
That maybe your concerns were overblown.
Their gods are gods of appetite and prone
To drunkenness from bouts of food and drink,
And powerful and vengeful in a blink
With hearts much colder than their statues’ stone.
So if Jerusalem is gone for good,
It seems its chosen people have to choose
Exactly what in exile they’re to do:
To take up stranger gods as best they could
Or in their hearts recall the mystery Who’s
The God of all that’s beautiful and true.
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The Fear
There’s come a growing fear of all that’s deep,
Of all that calls the soul down avenues
Whose grade of thought is admirably steep
And thereby human reason subtly trues;
A fear that free reflection might outleap
The narrow bounds of slogan-fettered views
And offer discourse of a broader sweep
Than rote regurgitation of the news.
Yet fears have long been held as hollow things
And hollow things can make a lot of noise.
They can in fact be deafening indeed,
While stillness marks substantial thought, which brings
To bear upon the din a counterpoise
In which the human soul is truly freed.
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Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Agape Review, America Magazine, Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review, U.S. Catholic, Grand Little Things, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, and various venues of the Benedictine monastery with which he is an oblate. He is editor of the Catholic Poetry Room page on the Integrated Catholic Life website.
As a Jewish person, I found the first poem really resonating with me. That constant dilemma: to what extent do we assimilate? You asked the question skilfully.
I love the way you get inside the minds of the people in “The Babylonian Exile”. “It seems its chosen people have to choose” is my favorite line, with its gentle irony. And what you say about fear of depth, in “The Fear”, resonates with me, as it seems that so many are ‘hollow men’, satisfied with shallow thinking, or very little thinking.
I salute your poems for their attactiveness (Some may overstate the case as “beauty”, but that magic in fact requires a longer acquaintance, I believe.) because they both invite serious thought. The first one hinges on the question of “Who’s the God of all that’s beautiful and true?” The only other god who seems to have the gripped the human imagination ever is the god of power, glory, wealth and owning slaves. One does not need to choose which faith to see that this is the god of self-destruction. In your second sonnet, the conflict lies between noise and silence: they are both unholy extremes. Surely any Lord worthy of our veneration wants us to ACT! since that is what we seem to have been created to do. So, therefore, we must keep our mouths shut except for the flashes of wisdom that keep us working toward our salvation. Poems like yours are worth remembering, if only to remind us what we should have done, if we didn’t!
In “The Fear,” Jeffrey, you have ably reversed the usual consideration of the broad path that leads to hell and the narrow one that leads to heaven. Instead, we see the narrow one as the easy way, and the steep or deep path as leading to broader vistas. The steep path requires dismissing hollow fear and passing through or beyond the noise created by hollowness, thus arriving at a surprise balance of thought in stillness, which may not be a height, but represents true freedom of the human spirit. This re-thinking of the two paths is a wondrous encouragement to follow the deep and steep path. And the accomplishment of putting it in sonnet form is a marvel of careful clarity.
I feel there is a close relationship between your two poems. The first portrays the dilemmas faced by the Jewish people when their land is taken and they are whisked away as slaves with many doubting that God is still with them and they either compromise with the devilish gods, or they stand on shaky ground in their mind that God cares, or worse yet is punishing all of them. The second contemplates “outleaping the fettered views,” and thus the decisions and courses that must be taken under adverse social conditions. To me the two are inextricably intertwined and exceptional!