Poem

Most mornings I try to catch "The Writer's Almanac" at 6:50 on our local NPR station. I've grown to love Garrison Keillor's voice reading me a poem as I merge onto 66 East.

And so when I came across Good Poems in a bookstore recently, I picked it up and have been working my way through it. Two days ago, I read the following poem and loved it, especially its one-long-strung-together-sentence feature. That element makes the "Hallelujah" at the end sound fabulous. It reminded me a little bit of the poem "The Creation" by James Weldon Johnson -- a sort of similar imaginative retelling of God's creating work. (On a side note, I still remember Dr. Panosian performing "The Creation" at a Sunday Vespers years ago at BJU. He had the perfect voice for it.)

Morning Person

God, best at making in the morning, tossed
stars and planets, singing and dancing, rolled
Saturn's rings spinning and humming, twirled the earth
so hard it coughed and spat the moon up, brilliant
bubble floating around it for good, stretched holy
hands till birds in nervous sparks flew forth from
them and beasts--lizards, big and little, apes,
lions, elephants, dogs and cats cavorting,
tumbling over themselves, dizzy with joy when
God made us in the morning too, both man
and woman, leaving Adam no time for
sleep so nimbly was Eve bouncing out of
his side till as night came everything and
everybody, growing tired, declined, sat
down in one soft descended Hallelujah.

~ Vassar Miller