My God wakes me, but I roll out of bed on my own.
Brush my teeth.
If my aspect is lassitude, God pokes me,
sighs while I attend to the minor gods I abide:
wind, water and agapanthus, hawks hovering over their prey;
my God snorts,
the old Hebrew God, who has my ear—
the faceless one in whose image I am made,
the impatient one who wouldn’t brook complaints, whooshed complainers
back into the earth,
sustained the plagued, the gallant
who mourned their ruined cities, and harnessed their fear
and fought back, and taught their children good ways to live.
For some there is no lack of gods, while others want none. Mine
is no prophet, merely hip
to human failings. Gets our stumbles into war, the persistence of dissent,
how bitter it is to distance, how fundamental to love. Mine gives me reason
to cleave to my hallelujahs. My amens.
Florence Weinberger is the author of six published collections of poetry, the most recent These Days of Simple Mooring, winner of the 2022 Blue Light Book Award. Five times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net, her poetry has appeared in a number of literary magazines, including The Comstock Review, Nimrod, Poetry East, Rattle, Baltimore Review, Mantis, The River Styx, North American Review, and The Los Angeles Review. Her poems have also been published in many anthologies, including Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, The New Los Angeles Poets, So Luminous the Wildflowers, and The Widows’ Handbook.