Julie G’s Reviews > Pilgrim Bell: Poems > Status Update

Lives pile up like constellations, diamonds on black silk ready to be
set in God's crown.

I demand
to be forgiven.

I demand
a sturdier soul.

Every person I've ever met
has been small enough

To fit
in my eye.

Hafez said
fear is the cheapest room
in a house, that we ought
to live in better
conditions.

. . . there are moments in every day when,
if you asked me to leave, I would.

All day I hammer the distance
between earth and me
into faith. . .

The difference between
a real voice and the other kind
the way its air vibrates
through you. The way air
vibrates. The violence
in your middle ear.

my father my father my father built
the world
the first sound I ever heard
was his voice whispering the azan in my right ear
I didn't need anything else
my father cherished
that we were ugly and so being ugly
was blessed I smiled with all my teeth

How to find your voice: try.
You're bound to it like a knight to his century.

Imagine the emptiness in you, the vast cavities you have spent
your life trying to fill--with fathers, mothers, lovers, language, drugs, money, art, praise--and imagine them gone. What's left? Whatever you
aren't, which is what makes you--a house useful not because its floorboards or ceilings or walls, but because the empty space between them.