ROBERT BENSEN

Robert Bensen has published six collections of poetry, most recently Before (Five Oaks Press), and Orenoque, Wetumka & Other Poems (Bright Hill Press).  Poems have appeared in Agni, Akwe:kon, Antioch Review, Callaloo, Caribbean Writer, Jamaica Journal, Native Realities, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Poetry Wales, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Thomas Hardy Review, and many other journals and anthologies.  He has also published essays and editions of West Indian and Native American writing.  He directed the writing programs at Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York, from 1978 to 2017.  His writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, the State of New York, Illinois Arts Council, the Robert Penn Warren Award, and others.  He has conducted the Seeing Things Poetry Workshop at Bright Hill since March 2019. Find him at https://robertbensen.com/.

THIS FRIDAY WE CALL GOOD

We inch, sun-blind, along the pew

past shapes hunched in solitudes of gloom.

We’re 2,000 years late for the execution,

for the first nail through the hand that opened forever.

For now, two handfuls of nails in the crossbeam

point every which way he’s gone, the carpenter

skilled to work wood to use and make it gleam,

to reveal its beauty with his finishing touch.

For splintered, weathered, misjointed souls, he did as much.

We heard he’d come back to finish us,

whose hammering hearts nail each other

to whatever cross of burning hate we favor.

Ever living, ever loving Lord of all creation,

God of this holy mess we’ve made of things,

God we’d like to nail down once and for all,

God who won’t stay put, or come when we call—

so not fair, not fair the way you disappeared

and left us poking around a hill the shape of a skull,

this Golgotha with its bouldered grin and eye hollows

hallowed or cursed, the horror we repeat verse by verse:  

Were you there, when they crucified our Lord? the choir inquires. 

I don’t believe we were.  Let me check the hour—

still twelve.  I tap the crystal.  This old watch I still wear,  

this time piece that seems to have died, my touch revives.  

I follow the secondhand circling round, once again

slicing minute after minute from the miracle

that we live and breathe and have our being in time,

when they nailed him to the cross, when the sun refused to shine.

Rewind the hour when they laid him in the grave

that causes me to tremble, tremble, the hour his suffering gave

on the one hand death, rebirth on the other, 

dovetailed end to end to end, year on year together.

Read Robert’s work and more in Solum Journal Volume I.