OLD JOB

Michael James

       Old Job, reduced by what he’s lost to begging scraps

        From wolves he’d spurned with his stick last night,                     

        Who now eat his sheep,

        Glares one-eyed at his limitations. And curses,

        Not loud but deep, issue from his clenched jaws.

        The first is at Jahveh for letting him believe in the first place

        While robbing him of the reasons to believe.

        The second is at himself for stooping to believe,

        For letting himself be beguiled into imagining for a moment

        That Jahveh or Fate or whatever would

        Focus minutely on one so quite nearly nothing,

        Possessing neither talents nor even innate goodness.

        And last he curses his attention for withdrawing at precisely

        The moment he needed it most,

        When intervention could have spared him his trials.

        Old Job, bereft of wife and daughters, those succors in times of need,

        Stands bareheaded in the pelting rain, and takes on God.

        “Why me?” he asks. “I praised the gloaming

        “When you went unseen about your work.

        “I gloried in the working of your hands;

        “I relished the products of your mind.

        “I praised you at dawn and at dusk.

        “Wherein do I fail you in your need?

        In what great urge do I hold you back?

        “Wherein have I sinned?”

        Silence stretches like a silken net across all the mouths in space.

        Silence answers Job his plaint and stops his cry.

        And dimly echoing through the halls of time,

        He hears Milton’s measure for God’s reply:

        “They also serve who only stand and waite.”

September 2013