Sunday Poem (Shabtai) + MLB

A Sunday poem, by the contemporary Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai (1939-), author of the courageous, ethically-clarifying book J'Accuse. This post is a quasi-response, I suppose, to hearing of John Paul II's death; I was baptized and raised in the Roman Catholic Church, but walked away from it and its numerous paradoxes, and towards sanity, half a lifetime ago.

PRAYER BOOK

by Aharon Shabtai

For years I’ve wanted to write a prayer book
Why? Because I’ve learned
that the solid hangs upon nothingness
Because I’ve found that the sentence is a kind of petition
And because I’ve found that in all that I’ve said,
in all that I’ve said I’ve said only thank you
so, little by little,
in fact I’ve written that book
and today it weighs some two-hundred pounds
and soon it will celebrate its fiftieth birthday
and yesterday I bought it shoes.

Copyright (c) 2002-2005, Aharon Shabtai. All rights reserved.
Translated by Peter Cole

***

Tonight marks the first day of the 2005 Major League Baseball season. Fittingly, the legendary New York Yankees, winners of the most championships in the game's history, play last year's World Series winners, the Boston Red Sox. My favorite team, the St. Louis Cardinals (blown out by the Red Sox last fall), hit the diamond on Tuesday, but the Yankees will do for today. Play ball!	Cards Star Albert Pujols