THREE JONAH POEMS

"Jonah" Philip Ratner

by Keith Schlegel

"Your Code Name is Jonah"
(after the “choose your own adventure” book by Edward Packard)

Jonah (he said): Your nose knows just the touch of stench;
Your hands see not;
your eyes draw the darkness;
Your mouth can neither feed nor smoke.

So. Listen. I,
Jahwe,
Speak.

Come, come—
Nineveh waits, in a whale of a mess.
Spain’s wattles are not for you, no how,
Believe me.

What does your Seiko say?
Can your digits tell
Big hands from little hands?
It’s time… it’s time…

In my ocean, my whales swim minnow-small;
Yet all—all
Is prepared. I know I’ll change my mind.
Change yours.

Think. One hundred twenty thousand and
Cattle!

Jonah (I say): Arise and go now.
Look through the mouth of day.
Meet, greet the dawn down.
Wake in his wake.
Rise-up sweet slug-a-bed
Plant your pity; give your forty days.

You’re my type, and
I’m behind you all the way,
Jonah.

(From Nightsun #2, 1982)

"Jonah in the Soup"

I’m in for it now.
This stilling of the water is for the sailors’ sake,
Not mine.
And they are, within my hearing, whimpering still
Their fear, their thanks, their promises.
And here I wait, upon the Lord’s petulant sea.
I told them to throw me over.
Tell me, how might I have known before
What even now, after this sign, is uncertain?
If every man followed every sign every time
And if all voice-like sounds we hear
Or think we hear
We obeyed, then
How should we be men at all?

I was asleep earlier. . .
I mean no disrespect.
It’s just that I have vagrant thoughts,
And anyway, am I a bird, a beast, a fish
To jerk to impulse not my own?

And say I knew, I really knew, what then?
I have no skill in speaking,
And Nineveh from what I’ve heard, is no Gomorrah,
And He’s relented before, with Isaac,
And there are
Others.

Hst! What’s that? a certain whoosh,
A wave slapping my ear?

A sudden shadow in the form of a shape advances.
I’m in for it now.

(From Nightsun #3, 1983)

"Jonah in Nineveh"

For long days, hot among the ashes
In which they sat, I walked.
They burned, of course, and so did I.
Fair, if effects be chained.
Worth it, if justice is final,
Confirming consequence from cause.
Fair if the predictable,
Just is the certain,
When we know.

“The End is Near,” I cried,
Until the syllables grew hoarse,
My soles blistered,
And the straps of the sandwich boards
Cut my shoulders.
So what if they fasted, and wept, and prayed?
Too little, too late.
Should a three-day fast abolish
Decades of excess?

This is why I fled before:
That fate not be fickle and that I
Not burn like this.
I sought a bower
Bereft of promised ill,
Your promise.

So let me die, ashamed,
Made a liar by your lies.
You repent your revelation; let me
Repent my repentance, and theirs.
You changed your changeless mind!
(No, but as nature and this city grow, pity grew.
Limitless pity makes all large and new.)

Three Days And Three Nights -- From Abstract to Concrete

"In The Beginning" 1993 Kim Jae Im -- Korea

I find the following discussion of the three days and nights fascinating. In all the reading I have done on Jonah and the sign of Jonah this breaks new ground. I quote this to add to the conversation of any who reads this blog. More after you read. JWS

"In the creation narrative things take three days to emerge from ideal existence to activity, from natural habitat to habitation by its inhabitant, so to speak. Thus, light is spoken forth on the first day (Gen 1:3-5) but does not become active until the fourth, through the creation of the luminaries (vv.14-19). The precondition of the winged creatures' appearance on the fifth day (vv. 20-21) is the stretching out of the firmament on day two (vv. 6-8). And, to complete the double and parallel triad, the dry land (day three, vv. 9-10) awaits its quadripeds and bipeds on the sixthe (vv.24-25). In short, for all creatures to emerge in days four through six, there is a requisite three-day hatching or incubation period.

One can detect a distant but eery parallel in Jonah's own "incubation," if that is the right term. One might say that Jonah's three days in the belly of the fish is nothing short of an emergence from darkness (the ship's hold) and watery chaos (shades of Genesis 1:2) and return to dry land." The Honeymoon Is Over: Jonah's Argument with God -- T. A. Perry pg. 216

The "Sign of Jonah" that Jesus promises in Matthew takes on a crisp crackle in my ear when I pass it by the notion of Dr. Perry. The movement from Ideal existence to activity, from theory if you will to practice. Jesus couldn't have known for sure, in his humanity, what would happen on the other side of his cry, "it is finished!" What was finished could have been a wonderful but naive notion of a better world or his last breath or just one more entry into Sheol the place of the silent dead. However, three days is the time to get it right from the drawing boards to the showroom and into the
street. "Why are you seeking the living among the dead?" A good question that we
should perhaps answer. The sign of Jonah indeed! JWS

...and Belched Back Like A Word To Grace Us All

In my beginning was the memory, somehow
contradicting Jonah, that essential babe
of unbaptised digestion, being a nugget
to call pity on Jerusalem and on Nature, too

We have his travels in the snare so widely
ruminated,---of how he stuck there, was reformed,
forgiven, also--
and belched back like a word to grace us all.

There is no settling tank in God. It must be borne
that even His bowels are too delicate to board
a sniping thief that has a pious beard.
We must hail back the lamb that went unsheared.

O sweet deep whale as ever reamed the sky
with high white gulfs of vapor, castigate
our sins, but be hospitable as Hell.
And keep me to the death like ambergris,
sealed up, and unforgiven in my cell.

Hart Crane

Crane catches the image -- the "going down" like unto baptism. The image of death by drowning is clear in the baptismal liturgy. The collect at the end of the prayer for the candidates,

"Grant, O Lord, that all who are baptized into the death of Jesus Christ your Son may live in the power of his resurrection and look for him to come again in glory; who lives and reigns now and for ever." Amen. -- Book of Common Prayer pg. 306 JWS

"Let Us Mark Well This Story: It Is A True Pattern Of Our Estate

Albert Pinkham Ryder ca. 1885

"Who hath not heard the story of Jonas? Jonas was in the whale's belly: the place was very dark: the waves beat on every side: he was drowned, yet touched no water; he was swallowed up, yet not consumed; he lived without any sense of life; the fish was death, the sea was death, and the tempest was death; yet he died not; but lived in the midst of death, he could not see, he could not hear, he knew not to whom he might call for help; he was taken and carried away, he knew not whither. Let us mark well this story: it is a true pattern of our estate, and sheweth what our Life is in this world. (John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury -- from his A Treatise of the Holy Scriptures 1570)

What A Noble Thing Is That Canticle In The Fish's Belly

"Jonah" -- Sistine Chapel -- by Michelangelo

"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters -- four yarns -- is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul Jonah's deep sealine sound! What a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the bloods surging over us, we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters, sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book ob Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God." (Father Mapple, in Hermann Melville's Moby Dick)

Design And Disorder: The Dance of Freedom

Humans are created free. Freedom is not an illusion. Choices freely made have real and lasting consequences!

God has made humanity free -- really free -- free to chose relationship with God and also free to reject intimacy with the creator. Jonah is free. He takes steps to leave the presence of the Lord. Of course he encounters God's design. In four chapters we see played out the basic theme of the Bible. JWS

“The depth with which human nature is imagined in the Bible is a function of its being conceived as caught in the powerful interplay of this double dialectic between design and disorder, providence and freedom. The various biblical narratives in fact may be usefully seen as forming a spectrum between the opposing extremes of disorder and design.” pg. 33 -- The Art of Biblical Narrative -- Robert Alter

“The Bible tells a story of an event between persons, divine and human. The mark of a person, divine or human, is to be free. This is the moral or dramatic fabric of the biblical drama.” -- pg. 31 The Comedy of Revelation: Paradise Lost and Regained in Biblical Narrative – Francesca Aran Murphy

On The Names Of God

"Jonah in the Fish" -- David Coker

I was weaned on the King James Version of the Bible (and the language thereof still doth fill my heart and lips upon occasion) and was taught to call God Jehovah which is a good Old Testament sounding name. During my early days at Seminary imagine my naive surprise when I attended chapel and someone read a lesson from scripture that called God -- Yahweh. "What," I thought. But I learned. Actually I learned a lot that my Sunday school over looked namely that God had a few names in Genesis and the other Books of Moses. One writer used Yahweh (or in King James Jehovah). Another writer used Elohim which is actually plural. In addition they are sometimes used together. We find this in Jonah. JWS

The name Lord (YaHWeH) is used 22 times. God (Elohim or El once) 13 times, and the combination Lord God 4 times for a total of 39 references in 48 What do we make of the patterns of these names? What do they say about God? Scholars have as many opinions as
there are scholars.

"However one, Jonathan Magonet has suggested an explanation that is simple and compelling. When the narrator is speaking of divine punishing action, the narrator uses the more general, Elohim or God. ... however, where the emphasis in on divine grace, mercy, and care, the more personal designation Yahweh again appears. The compound form Yahweh Eolhim (Lord God) in 4:6 makes the transition." [JONAH A Commentary pg. 45 -- Limberg]

Again we find and layer upon layer. Jonah is brief in length but not in depth. Like Jonah we go down to the deep and find ourselves, if we dare, and having met ourselves we are found by God in all the complexity, fierce beauty, judgment and grace of the divine presence. JWS