The Book of Baa
all that remains of Habakkuk
Lord
I have heard
you
repeat
Lord
like the sunrise
Lord
you
lift
sun and moon
with
my
own ear
you pierce
my
head
when
you trample
the sea with your
lips
my bones
tremble
yet I will wait patiently
as
the fig tree
Lord
Lord
like the feet of a
sheep
The Book of Haze
all that remains of Zephaniah
morning by morning
shoulder to shoulder
oppressors
will
consume
but
you
will not be found in their mouths
do not trust
roaring lions
evening wolves
or
people
obey
no one
do not let your hands hang
your God
Katie Manning is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review and an Associate Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She is the author of Tasty Other, which won the 2016 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and four chapbooks, including The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman. Her poems have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, New Letters, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and many journals and anthologies. Find her online at www.katiemanningpoet.com.
‘These poems are from a project-in-process that uses the last chapter of each book of the Bible as a word bank. I began this project in protest–I was tired of people taking language from the Bible out of context and using it against others as a weapon–but as I continued I realized that this process of creating poems also resembles the practice of Lectio Divina, divine reading’
