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The Meaning for the Hebrew of This Word Is Uncertain—Anna Friedrich


By Anna Friedrich


I want to believe

You care about the colors

I recently painted my kitchen.


It’s where we always sit and it wasn’t 

Bezalel alone designing your home.


You said Make angels

dance across the curtains


inscrutably. You said Purples

and blues, yes! will hold


my Presence in just the right

saturation. You must


remember – I do – how detailed

your directives read, how


every generation since knows

of arc and pitch, of rings


and poles and a shimmering bowl

— a sea of instructions so many

get lost in. But now I see


your finger on the tablets, a master-

ful script, your draughting tools, the smack


of your delighted lips at each inch

of hard-won overlay. 


It’s golden, LORD! Beauty


will not be outdone. Help

my unbelief.

A Note from Anna about the Poem

More and more I find myself writing poems in direct conversation with the Bible. I’ve sensed an invitation to walk around in the landscape of the Bible with my imagination activated and in hopes of true encounter. It started with Elijah and Elisha, and what became the prophet poems, which are now collected under the title Yahweh Loves a Desert (forthcoming from Square Halo Books). But it has expanded to include the entire Old & New Testaments in a new series I’m working on called “An Overness.” Continuously intrigued by the ways the Scriptures reveal God as “up” or “over” us, I’m searching out the text’s directionality — mountaintops, hovering, height, as well as descent, the incarnation, the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven — and I’ve been surprised by the poems that are forming. This poem began as a meditation on Exodus 31:18: “When the LORD finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the covenant law, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God.”

Anna A. Friedrich is a poet and arts pastor in Boston. She serves as the Creative Director of the Easter Vigil at Church of the Cross. Her writing can be found in CRUX, EcoTheo, Fare Forward, Common Good, the Rabbit Room, and elsewhere, and she was a contributor to Every Moment Holy Vol III. Anna is the author of two poetry collections, Under the Terebinth (2024, Wipf & Stock, foreword by Malcolm Guite) and Yahweh Loves a Desert, forthcoming from Square Halo books, a 33-poem sequence riffing off the narratives of the prophets Elijah and Elisha. She shares an original poem plus a little theologizing every other Wednesday morning at annaafriedrich.substack.com. Anna and her husband Dave have two adult sons and one cat named Vesper that they tend to treat like their third child.



 
 
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