POEM
"God Loves You, and So Do I"
Because it is what he says always, to anyone
(the dull girl in the tollbooth at the Triboro Bridge,
the wrong number who calls every night at nine,
the lamed colostomist who checks his colon,
even the stone-faced trooper who stops him
for driving 30 on the New York Thruway), my father,
the old Hassid from Frankfurt, passes through this life
in the vague service of some deific love,
and now I—having passed through hate
and back into love again—find myself saying it too
as we scud down the turnpike from Bar Harbor to Boston,
and a vague, generalized tenderness comes over me
in which I am the large man who carries his father
like unleavened bread, the one appointed
to shake the seeds of his ancestry into the day,
and, as we cruise down the highway
of tollbooths and diners, I become once more
the wild ideologue of my father’s life—a man
waiving a white handkerchief into the air as he
plays the harmonica, calling out
to anyone who will listen:
“God loves you, and so do I.”
Reprinted from The Wages of Goodness by Michael Blumenthal by permission of the University of Missouri Press. Copyright © 1992 by the Curators of the University of Missouri.
Source: The Wages of Goodness (University of Missouri Press, 1992)
Michael C. Blumenthal is a poet and educator who has also ventured into essays, memoirs, and . . . MORE »
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