Let me tell you about my marvelous god

By Susan Stewart b. 1952 Susan Stewart

Let me tell you about my marvelous god, how he hides in the hexagons

of the bees, how the drought that wrings its leather hands

above the world is of his making, as well as the rain in the quiet minutes

that leave only thoughts of rain.

An atom is working and working, an atom is working in deepest

night, then bursting like the farthest star; it is far

smaller than a pinprick, far smaller than a zero and it has no

will, no will toward us.

This is why the heart has paced and paced,

will pace and pace across the field where yarrow

was and now is dust. A leaf catches

in a bone. The burrow’s shut by a tumbled clod

and the roots, upturned, are hot to the touch.

How my god is a feathered and whirling thing; you will singe your arm

when you pluck him from the air,

when you pluck him from that sky

where grieving swirls, and you will burn again

throwing him back.

Susan Stewart, “Let me tell you about my marvelous god” from Columbarium (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). Copyright © 2003 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: Columbarium (The University of Chicago Press, 2003)

Biography

In an interview at the University of Pennsylvania, Susan Stewart said that her primary goal as a poet is “to get people to read more slowly, and to reread, and to read a whole book and go back to the beginning of the book and see connections.” Her writing can be startlingly clear, while at the same time—in the words of the MacArthur Foundation, on the occasion of presenting her with a “Genius Award”—it makes “strange and . . .

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