Featured Writer Devon Balwit
Morning Devotional
You Google Can smart people believe in God?
a yes would be a pregnancy test with no stripes,
your life as you imagined it, a no a beeline to stirrups
and the aspirator. Or is it the opposite?
Like a field that despises the plow,
you hate your receptivity, why
should any such seed grow in you? You loved
your rich fallow, the black sparkle of the universe
seen from a distance. You read the psalms and take
umbrage. Who are the psalmists kidding? —the world
doesn’t work this way; the good fall sick, fall
in battle, fail. They suffer short lives of abject
humiliation. Anyway, you are not of their number.
You make another pass-through, cherry-picking verses
you can live with: Even in old age they will produce
fruit, they will remain vital and green. To this at least,
amen.
About the writer:
Devon Balwit‘s most recent collection is titled A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found or are upcoming in Jet Fuel, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Rattle, Apt (long-form issue), Grist, and Oxidant Engine among others. Devon Balwit is the O:JA&L Featured Writer for June 2019.
Image: Sunflowers, 1917 (Verspottung) by Emil Nolde (1867-1956). No medium specified. No size specified. 1917. Public domain.
