And I Said to My Soul, Be Loud by Christian Wiman

I am the sound the sun would make if the sun could make a sound

And I Said to My Soul, Be Loud

by Christian Wiman¹

---

Madden me back to an afternoon 
I carry in me 
not like a wound
but like a will against a wound

Give me again enough man 
to be the child
choosing my own annihilations

To make of this severed limb 
a wand to conjure
a weapon to shatter
dark matter of the dirt daubers' nests 
galaxies of glass

Whacking glints
bash-dancing on the cellar's fire
I am the sound the sun would make 
if the sun could make a sound 
and the gasp of rot
stabbed from the compost's lumpen living death
is me

O my life my war in a jar 
I shake you and shake you 
and may the best ant win

For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things 
and I will ride this tantrum back to God

until my fixed self, my fluorescent self 
my grief-nibbling, unbewildered, wall-to-wall
     self
withers in me like a salted slug

1. Originally published in Hammer Is the Prayer: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016)