How to image good and evil? It’s hard to do in a way that astounds us afresh with how they penetrate every aspect of our lives. Yet Jeanne Murray Walker manages to do this in “God Reads the Poem of the World with Interest.” Evil is terrifyingly concrete: men setting a boy’s mother on fire and others who simply watched. Good is concrete too, personified by the boy’s teacher, who cares for the boy in a tender way that a mother would do. And then there’s the ambiguous penultimate stanza, with its image of a future where the boy will become blind. Yet this isn’t presented in tragic tones, because the floating orange leaves of the poem’s opening are still “seen.” Walker’s vision of our world is fundamentally positive. She closes the poem by returning to the teacher who still “sneaks / food to broken kids” — and who then, in the profound final sentence, becomes God’s body.

—Peggy Rosenthal

---

“God Reads the Poem of the World with Interest,” by Jeanne Murray Walker

For Kathy Meermans

Orange leaves float through air
like sunfish lazing in a pond

and the hungry boy with a cowlick
walks by my house again, dirty boy,
they say, who watched men set
his mother on fire.
——————His teacher
brings him cheese and apples
in her blue cloth bag
and when he wipes his nose
on his shirtsleeve, she offers him
a Kleenex.
—-—-Think of how
with the same fingers that now
grasp his yellow pencil, he
will some morning lift out
the lenses of broken eyes,
his hands delivering the blind
to see how orange leaves can swim
through air—the rods and cones
he’s learned, the macula, the cornea,

while his old teacher still sneaks
food to broken kids, because?
Because God has no body here on earth
but ours.

This post originally appeared in Issue 94 of Image Journal.