What others are saying about Psalm & Selah
What makes me like this little book so much is that it makes me think. I can imagine no higher praise.
—Jeff Needle, Association for Mormon Letters
Psalm & Selah awakens the feel of grit and muscle, fragrance and desire that had previously escaped me when I read The Book of Mormon. People are moving through these poems, real people carving out their lives in the shape of God’s will as best they can discern it. Form me, empathy comes easier when ideas and attitudes belong to individual people, and inspiration originates from someplace deeper. These poems bring the book alive in a way I hadn’t known before.
—Andra Hansen, Professor of Communications, BYU–Idaho
Mark Bennion’s Psalm & Selah, as the title suggests, is a book of poems that enact a spiritual quest. In visionary lyrics and dramatic monologues Bennion reimagines the lives of characters from The Book of Mormon. To read these poems is to enter a liminal space in which one can “hear / a sandal lift from Jerusalem stone” or see a “slow plume / wafting / out / of the burning / bush” or feel the sense of “vision / lifting us higher than the song of birds / as they dip and soar” Psalm & Selah honor their subjects with imaginative intensity and uncommon richness of language.
—Greg Pape, Montana Poet Laureate, author of American Flamingo
In Mark Bennion’s Psalm & Selah minor characters from a major book of scripture speak in diverse, language-loving monologues that probe the challenges and blessings of faith. Obscure events become bright narratives; and silent songs, rich lyrics. These poems take the reader—along with the mysterious, worshipful company who left Jerusalem—to a vivid promised land. Psalm & Selah is fresh water from the well of “pondering the scriptures.”
—Jim Richards, poetry editor, Irreantum
Psalm & Selah
A Poetic Journey Through The Book of Mormon
Mark Bennion
Published by Parables at Smashwords
Copyright 2009 Mark D. Bennion
This book is available in print at most online retailers.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Author photography: James D. Allen
Cover photography: George R. Bentley Jr.
Mahmoud Darwish, Munir Akash, editor, The Adam of Two Edens: Selected Poems (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 95. © Syracuse University Press. Reproduced with permission from the publisher.
Excerpt from “This is where we live” from EXTRAVAGARIA by Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid. Translation copyright © 1974 by Alastair Reid. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
“Circulatory Poem” (excerpt of seven lines)
“I Speak of the City” (excerpt of seven lines)
By Octavio Paz, Translated by Eliot Weinberger, from COLLECTED POEMS 1957–1987, copyright 1984 by Octavio Paz and Eliot Weinberger. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Parables
PO Box 58
Woodsboro, MD 21798
For Kristine
&
The many whose stories are yet to be told
Contents
Sorrow for the Sins of the World
Versions of these poems have appeared or will appear in the following publications, to which grateful acknowledgment is made.
BYU Studies, “Astonishment,” “The Dream”
caesura, “Dearth”
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, “Caught Up,” “Compass,” “My Brother’s Bed,” “Sober Child,” “Sorrow and Song”
Irreantum, “Coronation Plea,” “Curious,” “Dear Father, Love, Abish,” “Nahom,” “Swollen,” “We Have”
LDS Life, “Treasury,” “Tribute”
Natural Bridge, “Sowing”
Perspective, “I Will Go Again,” “Consolation,” “Rameumptom,” “Song of Arrival,” “Temple”
Steinbeck Review/Steinbeck Studies, “Price”
During the production of this book, many have influenced the course of my spiritual ponderings and journeys. Blessings to the BYU–Idaho administration and English department for the time and monetary means to work on this manuscript. I am also grateful to Jim Richards for his careful reading of this collection and for our various and sundry discussions over the years regarding poetry, racquetball, music, etc. Special kudos to the Epiphanic Dews—Dawn Anderson, Matt Babcock, Janine Gilbert, Jim Papworth, and Ellen Pearson—you talented ones who have workshopped and bettered a number of poems herein. Your insights and banter have allowed me to rethink my work and aesthetic. Moreover, I thank Andra Hansen, Christie Lewis, David and Dawn Pulsipher, and others for their willingness to read this work and offer constructive criticisms. I further appreciate the great support from colleagues and students, both past and present. A mountain of gratitude to my parents, siblings, and in-laws for their love and guidance. Thank you for your authenticity, humor, and devotion. To my daughters, I send a thousand kisses for loving me regardless of whether or not I write poems. And to Kristine, my best reader and friend, I thank you for the years behind us, the one accompanying us, and for the many to bind us in the seasons to come.
These poems came into being due to my love for the Book of Mormon—a powerful yet still relatively unknown text to many people in the world. In no way am I trying to offer an alternative for a first-hand reading of this sacred work, nor is this poetry manuscript an official publication of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Furthermore, this collection is not trying to clarify doctrine or history. Rather, these works represent an attempt at imagining the inner lives of fascinating people, places, and events that appear for a few verses in the Book of Mormon and then drift into the shadows of the past.
I speak of the forest of stone, the desert of the prophets, the ant-heap of souls, the congregation of tribes, the house of mirrors, the labyrinth of echoes,
I speak of the great murmur that comes from the depths of time, the incoherent whisper of nations uniting or splitting apart, the wheeling of multitudes and their weapons like boulders hurling down, the dull sound of bones falling into the pit of history.
Octavio Paz
However much I admire Nephi
I know it is with Sam
I hold the greater kinship.
Something drawn out between us
Like an unspoken monologue
I can hear inside myself,
As so many hear inside themselves—
This percolating, mobile
Snowmelt forging a stream.
Yet others name the movement
Bring to light that eloquent, spoken gift,
Supernal and warning,
Born of blizzard visions and volcanic dreams
Of God’s word lofted from a mountain top
And prayer strong as a tidal wave.
Even as the world chases after blinding antics
Consciously proclaiming
Choices
Out of the gargoyle of some new sin,
Even as charity and pillage square off
In remote villages and city centers
Not that this news is beyond my scope
Or even worth dredging up
Once again . . .
I just kneel down to knowing
A story has more than a rebellious
Brother
And a future prophet. There are those braced
Against a holy staff, adjusting their shoes,
Unnoticed
Thou art my hiding place; thou
shalt preserve me from trouble;
thou shalt compass me about with
songs of deliverance. Selah.
Psalms 32:7
I sleep to murmur and cracked wheat.
My eyes half-open, kaffiyeh rolled back,
lamp on and trimming, the goats and camels
spin away. My tent door unfolds
onto the valley of Lemuel’s venting.
A wind rushes forward, sifts the chaff
of my resistance. I walk on a trail
of yucca and stone. Low clouds cover
the noonday sun, and I keep moving
beside a green river, beside a tar fountain
where men count hooks in their bait,
make nets out of their addictions.
Mothers weep at their children fishing.
People carry dice and chandeliers, shout,
Mint. Manners. Go to the building,
the building, the building. Laman
and Lemuel roam through traces of light,
then whirl away. In the fog
I bow my head, taste salt in the air.
The voices rise, my mind pushes on.
Up ahead Sariah and Nephi peel fruit
in a white garden. Sam begins to speak.
The path straitens among bellows
and raw meat. I recall the dust
of my gold staircase and hear
a sandal lift from Jerusalem stone.
I gird myself against upheaval,
burrow into frontier religion.
through the caverns, under the overhangs
around the seduction of precipice,
winding beside the dialogue and strain
of wasteland, dromedary, prescience,
and this festering desire to run.
I will go past the copper of Timna,
hide away like a badger from the sun,
ache for the Middle Gate guarding Judah,
and say the shemma even if I fall.
And if God wills, I shall go over stones
in the streets of Mishneh, follow the wall
once I reach the Machtesh, and then postpone
all dread until it abides in delay.
When I see Ishmael, I’ll know what to say.
Zoram
I was kneaded, and caught
inside damp walls, a face without sun.
Trusted by the brass and zealots,
the elders’ secrets alone with me,
I mastered the diplomacy of Jerusalem
and nightfall, the slippery voices
of the treasury, to act mute when necessary,
only my keys rattled in torch light.
When I heard the voice,
I sensed exile like storm.
A glance at the sword’s red tint
jostled me to chatter.
Cautious and fraught with burden,
his voice strained for the record,
wavering through the chamber,
yet the armor kept an even, steady
burnish.
Over and over I spoke of the elders
as he ordered me to follow him.
He turned quiet until we saw men running,
legs and sand and murder in the air.
My own body clutched by a glint of iron,
a faint strip of moonlight, a lost veneer
and a voice filled with pledge—
the rush of freedom jolting his lips
as he desired me to journey
to the tent and sacrifice of his father.
Since then, I have marveled
how I came to hold the keys, still
and lonely in the jeweled silence.
My children ask me now
how I left the thrill of silver
for the wild scratch of quartz.
Even as the Lord lives, I say,
and as I live, I will lie down at night
in the cool breeze of liberty, the earth
holding me fast to its movement,
sure as sunrise, vast as its fiery glow.
In the simmer and slow furnace
of morning, the ball sits on the ground
rotund as pomegranate, a misshapen
amphora ripe with early light. Spherical,
hardy, ready for heft and masked
with a faint glaze of brass. It is a friend
without lament, without need for inflating
or pretense. It circles your trudge
through sand; it ignites leading questions,
taking you to the taste of untamed roots
and the immersion of honey, then pares
down days to prayer shawl. Your group
snubs then pleads with its spindles,
their tips evanescent in the serpentine dark.
Beside crevices, field and angle
weld beneath the sterile north,
nudging you toward a longer day.
At noon the compass is unseen,
sometimes remembered, snug
in the necessary bundle of rods,
deep in dreams like the brewing
of an unnoticed boil. It will begin
to hurt you or me or the ear
entrenched against hint or granting.
Its magnetism awakens as famine
starts to thrum—the straight-line
boredom, weariness, rule. And
before long, you see it in every stone-
face, in each yellow evening, it cools
on the horizon: Remember smallness,
the pebble stuck in the cistern’s core.
Its rounding bulk festers
in detour, the arrows deaden
in a persisting storm. Test the sphere
and it will mimic or heal the asp’s bite.
It is ensign and lodestone.
It’s apocalyptic, each season,
regardless of the coming moon. It is
ghost needling substance. It’s right outside
your tent, the quick shift between a hike
and wandering where the hills may cleave
together or drop you in the divide.
He stiffens beneath the tent,
stationary on his sickbed,
watching the red-brown puffs of myrrh
burn more than a fortnight of our journey.
Two camels bow near the door,
an emblem of fatigue about to kneel down,
but rise up, step back into the dry air.
The sand separates and stings.
No one speaks
but the lone fowl, with a broken wing,
perched on the hill above our caravan,
waiting for us to leave or die.
My sisters and I divide work
under the advancing khamsin,
and narrowing sun.
We listen again for our father’s
breathing and dither as the air does.
He awakens to each of us moving in
and out of the tent. Wind continues
its blast and whine; stray brush
succumbs to the inevitable spin,
conceding to the desert sheen.
How the lizards shrink beneath the rocks!
Our husbands, return from a hunt,
heavy, breathless, spent for water
as the sand turns into wave,
a winding curl blocking daylight.
Abba pants something about wells
and then sighs, “Brass plate.”
He knows it’s here, plateau and pathway,
and the camels come back,
prod the flap of the door,
probing for shelter from the storm.
His brown eyes retract
to the top of the tent,
the terrain shifts, his trek now
a certain escape
from the howl blowing in.
left the hill-canton of limestone
maintaining all we knew of pillar and roof—
all we remember of slat and mud plaster—
and made yerida from our upper rooms,
deserted the tabret for sore feet and wildness,
bickering over quarters of emptiness,
trying to fashion out of rock or brier
a trace of home-reed courtyard and pole,
abandoned the protective, generous Millo
towering above Kidron and Hinnom,
Salem abundance piled high on threshing
floors brim with the vigor of wheat,
lost the taste of it near the Salt Sea’s
wave as we burned for grapes dripping
mush and skin, the sticky juice
circling our wrists like bracelets,
dropped down from the conduit of the fuller’s
field, the amethysts of Judah, backsliding
from tradition and ossuary of Josiah
or the glory of mantle and Hezekiah,
extended to the root with driving hunger
and travailed to evade fire and gin
while the wide plains expose us to slave
commerce or bribery or a foreign tongue,
removed from the gloss of our youth
those ornaments tinkling in the sun,
the forbidden kohl and expensive nard,
our want to wear a garland again,
altered under the midday pyre, our
prayers once ascending near the fleshhooks
on Mount Moriah, above the cool
Gihon ready to slake our thirst,
dried up to a three-day grumble, the next
meal always an afternoon in front of us,
and years from the kindness of Samra,
Ahinoam, Amira, Banat, Dalal,
forgotten the veils of Hasab, Miriam, Yumm,
Haya as we slog through quarrels and heat,
our father—a tomb—our memory ablaze
with Zion’s center in the center of the world.