Psalm 90—Time the Spit Pip of an Orange

"Lyric of bodies, circlet of thorns, the heavens in a handsbreadth..."

A Note From Andy

You can catch up with previous posts here: 1, 2, 8, 13, 14, 16, 19, 22, 29, 31, 32, 34, 38, 42, 46, 51, 53, 73, 74, 84, 86, 88, 107, 121, 123, 130, 131, 137, 142, 147, and the Guided Tour.

Rendition of Psalm 90

A prayer of Moses, the man of God

Lord, you have been our home
Since time was numbered.
From before you raised the mountains
Or writhed in pain as you bore the earth,
From the deeps of time, you are our God.

You send man back to dust
And return to ash the children you made,
For a thousand years in your sight
Are like the memory of yesterday
Or a watch in the night.
They rush away like sleep at daybreak,
Or grass that grows in the morning
And by the evening is gone.

For your anger brings me to an end
And your displeasure dismays me.
You have set my guilt before you,
And the secret lives I thought I’d hid
Shine before you against a backdrop
Of failed renunciations. My accumulated days
Bend double on themselves and groan.
I feel my years like a thorn circlet
Twisted down on my own head.

The years of life are seventy
Or perhaps eighty but their span
Is toil and trouble and curse.
They are thistle
And the wind takes them.

Where is the one who truly knows
The weight of your anger?
Who is able to give you your due fear?
Make our hearts fill up with wisdom.
Teach us to number our days
And show us our place in them.

When will you return to us, Lord?
When will you comfort us?
Who will carry the mark of your name now?
Satisfy us with your unfailing love
That renews itself each morning.
We do not want to mourn, but sing.
Give us joy that surpasses the days of pain
And fills up the years of disaster with goodness instead.
Let us wonder at your works on the earth again.
Unveil your hidden glory to our children’s children.
Settle your kindness down around us in heaps
And establish the work of our hands.

Yes, establish the work of our hands.

Notes on the Rendition

Psalm 90 is a difficult psalm. In my rendition, it has lines like

“You have set my guilt before you,
And the secret lives I thought I’d hid
Shine before you against a backdrop
Of failed renunciations…”

and

“Where is the one who truly knows
The weight of your anger?”

These aren’t lines you’ll see embroidered on a wall hanging any time soon.

The Bible has a lot to say about grace and mercy, about God’s commitment to his creation, about apologies and reconciliations that recur not seven times, but seventy-seven times. It also has a lot to say about our secret sins, about the black threads at the back of the tapestry, about long repentance that never seems to take, how swiftly life passes, how full it can be of regret and uncertainty, and about God’s rage at evil even when it is found inside his people, not only arrayed against them.

It is easy to shy away from the difficult parts of scripture, but perhaps these are the passages that deserve more of our attention, not less?

Each age, each culture has its own proclivities, its own acceptable sins, and its own cherished ways to blunt the force of God’s revelation. It is easy, then, to choose from the wide array of God’s word the bits that rub least against the grain of the intuitions of our day. However, for the Christian, the difficult parts of the Bible are the minority report in our self-curated canon and, as such, we need them. If there are underdeveloped parts of our notion of God or blind spots in our affections, the cure for those deficiencies may hide in those parts of the Bible we find hardest to read.

Notes on the Poem

Like the poem for Psalm 32, this poem takes its form from George Herbert’s Prayer (1), but instead of prayer (as with Herbert) or grace (as with Psalm 32), the topic is time.

As with the poem for Psalm 32, it is chock-full of allusions to the Bible and to other sources. The “water barely dimpled” hails from C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. The “silence between breaths of bellsong,” the “thistledown the wind has taken,” and the “dead risen, blinking at the light” come from other poems in the Darkling Psalter. The line “A thousand years, a watch in the night” links the poem to Psalm 90. I’ll leave the rest of the links to your imaginations. Bonus points if you can find Elijah hiding in the poem.

Give the Poem a Title

I’ll title this poem in a couple of days if I don’t hear from you, but I’m leaving the first pick for readers. The naming convention for these poems is that the title must be a line from the poem.

Send your suggestions to andymatthewpatton@gmail.com or leave them in the comments.

Poem for Psalm 90—The Wind, The Whisper

Time the spit pip of an orange, a sliver,
The silence between breaths of bellsong,
The crucible cadence, the storm tail of summer,
The distance between seed and seed,
A thousand years, a watch in the night,
Thistledown the wind has taken,
A black bird with bare neck that was hung and lived,
Lyric of bodies, circlet of thorns,
The heavens in a handsbreadth,
A firestorm, a trembling, the wind, the whisper,
Dream of flesh, old bones clattering together,
Lungs breathing without meaning to,
Water barely dimpled for ghost feet,
The dawn chorus, the starless sky,
The dead risen, blinking at the light.

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Photo by Jan Kopřiva on Unsplash