On Reading the Book of Ezekiel in a Quaker Meeting

Poem by Stephen Yeo

Foreseen, told in the name of One not
(yet) born again, jealous, importunate God
landlord of His People: Israel has no need
or want to wander, will have found a plot
to till and tell in less than honeyed words
commanded, script in stone, covenanted,
their ark, their brood, all theirs to have and hold
with every modern ploughshare beaten into swords.

Uttered, come to pass: outsiders, Othered, look
on Zion, glass-eyed on Gaza, no settlement,
a strip. Of what? Palestine? From peleshet?
a Hebrew – and Egyptian – word for folks
who roll on, pass under to over, conquer
old-new lands. Israel fought Judah, wants ‘Judea-
Sumeria’. What’s in a name? ‘Arabia’?
And ‘Philistines’: (South) Canaanites from ‘Aegea’?

Big name, Jove. For the nameless one Jehovah,
I exhale h to breathe Yah Weh and say –
as a creature whose wordless way to pray
is breath – Oh my God, O Yah Weh
progenitor of Adam our Hebrew word for ‘earth’,
if, in the beginning, all of us came from One
how come we cannot let an Other in?
Breathe with me breath of god: bread, way, tree, stuff
                           
of Life.

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