NaPoWriMo Day 4: Speaking With the Divine

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Catastrophe is Next to Godliness” by Franny …

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

Imagine you can speak to God (or Divinity, The Universe, some sort of higher power).

What would you ask for? What would you confess? What do you want your higher power to know? How do you want to be seen by this higher power?

Freewrite for 8-10 minutes where you talk to that higher power.

Poem: “Catastrophe is Next to Godliness” by Franny Choi

Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.

The day A. died, the sun was brighter than any sun.
I answered the phone, and a channel opened
between my stupid head and heaven, or what was left of it. The blankness
stared back; and I made sound after sound with my blood-wet gullet.
O unsayable—O tender and divine unsayable, I knew you then:
you line straight to the planet’s calamitous core; you moment moment moment;
you intimate abyss I called sister for a good reason.

When the Bad Thing happened, I saw every blade.
And every year I find out what they’ve done to us, I shed another skin.
I get closer to open air; true north.

Lord, if I say Bless the cold water you throw on my face,
does that make me a costume party. Am I greedy for comfort
if I ask you not to kill my friends; if I beg you to press
your heel against my throat—not enough to ruin me,
but just so—just so I can almost see your face—

That opening line! Lord have mercy! This poem starts with a bang and ends with one, too, and I love its radical vulnerability, its stark humanity in the face of the unspeakable.

Admittedly, this is a fairly abstract poem, perhaps meant to be read as a collective invocation rather than a personal one. Some decisions in the language, like “what they’ve done to us” or “the Bad Thing” straddle the line between the personal and impersonal. The speaker of this poem also describes her own humanity in a sort of self-abstracting way: “my stupid head”; “my blood-wet gullet.”

Perhaps because of this—this catastrophe and self-abnegation—the speaker seems more able to speak to Divinity. The poem’s four stanzas feel organized in this way:

1. An invocation to the Lord,

2. The moment when the speaker came into contact with Divinity,

3. How this connection to the Divinity stays possible,

4. An interrogation of what this connection means for the speaker.

To be clear, Choi is making some bold, daring decisions in this poem. It isn’t particularly grounded: much of the imagery is abstract, and the speaker’s personal life is mostly a suggestion. I find that the voice of this poem is trying to be collective or universal. The speaker asks questions that many of us, in some way, are asking when we try to speak to a higher power, and it’s difficult for a poem to channel the collective in a poem. (I often find that the universal can be most easily found in the specific; Choi makes some daring leaps by straddling that border.)

But those decisions work because of how Choi speaks to the Lord. What does it mean for the speaker to be a costume party? What of this poem’s incessant hope that it can find God in ruin? What of this speaker’s hope to find salvation without pain? I also find that the poem’s abstraction works, in the way that higher powers are also abstract—real for those who believe in one, but still innately ungrounded, not easy to touch or perceive directly.

Although the speaker worries about being a costume party—a space that invites performance, not authenticity—I find that this poem’s radical honesty brings me closer to a higher power. This is a poem that wants to stare at the sun, so to speak; to reach for a truth that blinds. Isn’t that what we’re trying to do, anyway, whether we’re poets or preachers?

Prompt

Write a poem that beckons with the divine. Demand answers. Assert yourself, in all your fragile humanity, in front of a higher power. 

If you have no creed or solid belief, feel free to direct your energies towards the Universe, towards history, towards the human collective, etc. The point is not religiosity, necessarily, but to speak towards something bigger than yourself, and reveal your own humanity through this speaking.