A Good Day for God – a poem by John Claiborne Isbell

A Good Day for God


Today has been a good day for God.
            He has created colors and the antelope,
            cafés and railway sidings and overpasses.

A billion billion leaves are singing His praises,
            dancing in the wind that He unleashed.
            He’s listening to Miles Davis.

And God has decided to sing.
            What He sings is this:
            “I am the alley and the cat,

the baseball and the baseball bat.”
            With that, He is silent again.
            And the planets spin,

and the galaxies spin,
            and every electron in this universe 
            spins on its axis.

John Claiborne Isbell is a writer and now-retired professor currently living in Paris with his wife Margarita. Their son Aibek lives in California with his wife Stephanie. John’s first book of poetry was Allegro (2018); he also publishes literary criticism, for instance An Outline of Romanticism in the West (2022) and Destins de femmes: Thirty French Writers, 1750-1850 (2023), both available free online. John spent thirty-five years playing Ultimate Frisbee and finds it difficult not to dive for catches any more.