Notes from the Cistern
February 588 BC
Jerusalem, Quarters of the Guard
The Cistern of Malachiah; nearby, an almond tree.
The prophet, Jeremiah, is besieged by those who would silence him.
I know the hemisphere of my thoughts…
but not of Yours.
Words, sentences are scumbled.
Mired. Captive.
I am target: labelled, persecuted, mocked;
only the watching-tree saw my struggle,
my resistance, my unwilling descent
into the cistern, finding only soft, pitiless mud
at the bottom.
The stillness overwhelms intention,
and I, messenger, have no voice for words,
even those engraved with an iron stylus.
In this loathsome borderland between earth
and hell,
I am bound in the blind length of dread.
Light from the bottle-shaped mouth above,
lights only slightly.
Dolomitic limestone and chert walls,
covered with broken plaster of lime paste,
surround me,
and I have been entrapped by the
broken cisterns I deride.
The stone cover replaced overhead is shroud;
all is ashen.
I am devoured by the darkness, abandoned.
A cricket begins to prophecy.
And am I to think God humorous
when He teases me with my own analogy?
Present reality forbids.
He makes a crucible out of my description,
my enslavement to truth.
Yet He has heard. Approved.
More often mine is the voice disapproved.
Jerusalem will fall as chastisement by
sword and famine, its cedars cut and
cast into the fire; its treasures will be in ruins,
dispersed;
its inhabitants will consume the flesh of
one another.
Ebedmelech, the Ethiopian, is here with
servants to lift me up into the sun-washed day.
He advises the worn and faded rags thrown down
be placed to prevent the ropes from burning.
And I am raised slowly as a pail of water,
once again to serve the thirst.
And still I am prisoner and Prisoner.
Ah yes. The almond blossoms.
Ann Power is a retired faculty member from The University of Alabama. She enjoys writing historical sketches as well as poems based in the kingdoms of magical realism. Her work has appeared in: Spillway, Gargoyle Magazine, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Dappled Things, The Copperfield Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The Loch Raven Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Amethyst Review, and other publications. She was nominated for Best of the Net in Poetry for her poem, “Ice Palace.”
Amethyst Review 