The Phrase Honest to God Has Always Confused Me, Why by Andrew Hemmert
"And what was the point of all that gold just to fill the ark with dust?"
The Phrase Honest to God Has Always Confused Me, Why
be honest with God, he who presumably already knows? Better to be honest with your postal worker or cashier— someone who can't call your bluff and therefore the honesty means something. Honest to Sarah who scans my shopper's card. Honest to Joe who delivers my bills, which is another accountability. Yesterday the three half-wild mutts that always get loose got loose, ran havoc through the neighborhood, chased the mail truck down the cul-de-sac like archeologists after the ark. I didn't remember God giving Moses specific measurements for building it, but he did. And what was the point of all that gold just to fill the ark with dust? Honest to God I can only imagine I would have been one of those at the foot of the mountain, such little faith—worshipping the calf, then drinking its ashes.
Read our interview with Poet of the Week, Andrew Hemmert, in which he discusses failure as the engine for change, the idea of God’s voice, and writing about the sublime through the mundane. About this, he says:
“I don’t think there’s a difference between the mundane and the metaphysical. There’s no seam in my poems because there’s no seam in the universe. I’m hardly the first person to say it, but the best way to get at the universal is through the personal. So when I’m cataloging the physical objects that comprise my day, my individual way of being in the world, I’m detailing my relationship with the infinite.”
I love the idea of this poem. The way things are nowadays, if you call it a poem, it's a poem, even if it's a painting. I feel compelled to straighten out some of the story line confusion though. Not sure whether or not it's intentional, but I have to get some benefit from all those afternoons in Hebrew School. so here it is, best I can remember.
Moses led the Jewish people out of Egypt (Passover) where they had no yeast and thus had to eat matzo. They wandered the desert for forty years. He then went up Mt Sinai (not the hospital, but the real mountain) and received the 10 commandments. When he came down from the mountain, he found that the people were worshiping a golden calf. He did not get any measurements for the calf and did not know they had done that. He was pissed. But he was not on the scene when the world flooded and God reportedly gave Noah the dimensions to build the arc. All things considered, it might have been a good idea to leave some of the critters, like mosquitoes, behind.
I love this poet of the week! Love the humor!