Psalm 142—Be Still Or Be Scattered
"You were lost loving the glamour of things."
Rendition of Psalm 142
Help me, God!
I plead for mercy.
I spill my anxious meditations before you like water;
I tell you all my troubles.
My spirit faints and flickers.
Can you see the path I’ve walked—
Where every step conceals a deadfall?
I am lost. I am alone.
No one takes notice of me.
No refuge remains to me.
No one is looking for me.
Help me, God!
You must be my shelter,
My portion while I am alive.
Hear me, God!
I have never been this low and lost.
Deliver me from what follows me
And from what I followed,
For I am overwhelmed.
Bring me back again,
And I will praise you with my whole life.
Surround me with goodness and safety.
Notes on Psalm 142
Note #1: “I spill my meditations before you like water”
A strict translation of verse 2 might be something like:
“I pour my musing before your face,
I make known my distress before your face.”
I rendered verse 2 as:
“I spill my anxious meditations before you like water;
I tell you all my troubles.”
There are many times in this project that I bend the poem toward the Psalm, but this is a moment of bending the Psalm toward the poem. The poem I have paired with Psalm 142 is one in a series of poems that use the symbol of water to say something about regret, memory, life, and death. (In this case, the water is in the form of ice.)
Note #2: “Every step conceals a deadfall”
“My spirit faints and flickers.
Can you see the path I’ve walked—
Where every step conceals a deadfall?
I am lost. I am alone.
No one takes notice of me.
No refuge remains to me.
No one is looking for me.”
Again, I am leaving the road of a strict word-for-word translation behind and walking a parallel path in the rendition of this Psalm in order to position the Psalm and the poem in dialogue with one another. That being said, the rendition is based in the Hebrew. The word I translated as “deadfall” (a trap for large predators) is pach, a trap for birds. The word I translated as “faints and flickers” is ataph, to enfeeble, as when God says in Isaiah 57:16:
“For I will not contend forever,
nor will I always be angry;
for the spirit would grow faint (ataph) before me,
and the breath of life that I made.”
Notes on the Poem
This is a poem about someone who finds themselves stranded on a glacier. As I said above, the series (which will each be paired with other Psalms) use images of water in various forms to talk about regret, memory, life, and death. In each one, people find themselves caught and confronted by their past at the end of their lives.
“You are there alone, alive,
Improperly roped. Your compass
Spins at this latitude.
The snow suggests no path. The way is any way
but back.”
If you have ever crossed a glacier before, you will know that as the glacier flows down a slope cracks, called crevasses, open up in the ice. When it snows, the cracks are covered but not filled. So you have to be careful as you walk across because any step might take you out over a thin layer of snow suspended over a deep crack in the ice.
For this reason, you never cross a glacier alone. You tie yourself to others and spread out in a long line so that if one person falls through into a crevasse, the others can dig into the snow and stop that person’s descent. The character in the poem is in danger because he is “alone, alive, improperly roped.”
“The rainbow bridge ripples
Gossamer and glowing. Even a careful step
Could make all you once were shatter. It is be still
Or be scattered.”
The rainbow bridge is the Bifrost of Norse mythology. In the poem, it is a metaphor for death, a bridge to another world. It appears in the poem in the form of the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, and takes other forms in the other poems in the series of poems that use water as a metaphor.
Poem—Be Still Or Be Scattered
The glacier is still a river
The icefall still falling water.
The snow covers but does not fill
The cracks. The ice is so blue
It is black.
You are there alone, alive,
Improperly roped. Your compass
Spins at this latitude.
The snow suggests no path.
The way is any way
but back.
You don’t know how you came to be here,
Stunned, stuttering, concussed with cold. You were
Lost loving the glamour of things.
You didn't know you should have kept your time. How long?
And now it is gone.
You begin to suspect you feared
The wrong things and laid down in the wrong hopes
Like they were snow, to die. The Fear
You fled has known this place. You step
Carefully to its embrace.
The ice is thin. The air is thin. The very mountains
Have gone thin. The rainbow bridge ripples
Gossamer and glowing. Even a careful step
Could make all you once were shatter. It is be still
Or be scattered.
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