Eric Hoffman


The Song of the Suffering Servant


One

Where is the servant upheld,
where is the chosen one,

the one in whom God's soul delights?
Be comforted: 

His presence  
is not yet announced to us.

His voice will be heard
echoed from the deepest pits,

from the quiet sunken deeps
it will sound

the clearest of bells
heard upon the highest peaks,

a crystal blade that pierces clean
a confusion of tempests

choked with rain and dust.
And the lost and the holy

will gather together at the lowlands
to await his Law to speak:

Where is the servant upheld,
where is the chosen one,

the one in whom God's soul delights?
Be comforted.

His presence  
is not yet known to us.


Two

Hear me, lowland people.
I am brought forth from my mother's body

as an arrow unsheathed,
and the words my father gave me

are armaments given 
to the soldiers of the fields.

I have lain in the shadow of his hand,
a sharp arrow hidden in his quiver,

and my nock waits patiently
for the tension of his bow,

for his sure hands to grasp
my riser and fletchers 

and aim me where he wants me to go.
For the arrow is the archer's servant:

His will is the point,
and my heart is the target gold.

May I, crutched with bracer,
draw my shot with strength

and hit the face of it?
Will this mark align

or will it fishtail and porpoise
with a shyness of gold?

He tells me that I was formed
in the womb for this purpose,

that like the arrow
my lightness and speed 

are gifts of the air
and there is a thin precise path

to reach and pierce 
the tough muscle of the face,

that I was brought forth 
from my mother's body 

as an arrow unsheathed,
and the words my father gave me

are armaments given 
to the soldiers of the fields.


Three

There is darkness vanquished
by a tongue that,

like a diamond set in water,
arrays parched fields

with rivulets of rain,
ornaments trees

with a kaleidoscope of birds
whose choral voices burnish

words into music,
makes my face a flint 

that alights darkened paths out
from dessicated places

where songless moths
dumbly orbit diminutive flames,

their only sustenance
the ragged garments

of wanderers
blind to the glint of distant seas

and deaf to harlequin birds
who sing their songs of praise.


Four

1.

Under a canopy of wood
a crown of leaves splits the light.

Even kings will kneel before
the sapling's heartwood strength,

will cradle in their arms the foundling lamb
should its childlike cry catch their ears

amidst the cannon bursts 
of their craven aims of state.

Even the strongest wood bleeds
when pierced in the perfect place.

Oak, alder, birch, pine, ash–
the forest grows elder and dark.

Lambs led to slaughter were not admired
any more than elms felled 

to clear these forest paths, thinks the king.
Their tender mouths, softer than heartwood,

emit screams that wear the clean edge of air, 
radiant before the blade–

invisible souls crudely poured out to death.
The king in his quiet bedchamber drifts off to sleep

shielded from the tortured bursts
that crowd the soldiers' fields.

He contemplates why God allows
the strong to conquer the weak.

Thieves still travel those forest roads at night.
Had the Romans known their fates,

they may not have carved these confident paths
through such cold, remote hills of emerald and sea.

2.

He utters a word and ten thousand weathered stones
grow silent in abeyance, deep in their fixity, that flutters and sways invisibly—   

He hears them like a heartbeat, hears the granules of sand shifted
by the lash-like legs of ants, who pause in their parade to contemplate 
the drops of blood that pool and stand before them as unpassable red seas—

The humid swamps replaced by titanic glaciers, the sudden melt and freeze
whose only testament is in the silent stones and the massive, endless oceans,
the division of lands, the swell of towering mountains and volcanic bursts
from the cavernous deep—

I looked up into the heavens and in amazement I saw the clouds and birds 
stand perfectly silent and still, and then I looked to the earth—

The water in the stream appeared as crystal, dust hung motionless in the air,
a ghost struggled to materialize, faces froze into formless words 
and scratched at the wall of sound like hands fallen away in a windless fire.

Eric Hoffman is the author of Circumference of the Sun (Dos Madres, 2021), and the editor of Conversations with John Berryman (University Press of Mississippi, 2021) and a new edition of Philip Pain's Daily Meditations (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021). He lives in Connecticut.

 
 

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