Jonathan Edwards

By Rip Underwood

No death, no fracture, issued the day
our House’s joists, riven by frost,
knuckled off their notches, dropped
upon many a balcony’s full weight.
I called it a rebuke, a mercy, for nothing
happens without a great Consent.
The ecstasies came and went; foxglove
fell to winter, and all the colonies
felt of it, asking, “Pastor, what has come
upon Boston, upon Plymouth?”

When a country serpent lashes through stubble,
deep instinct alarms the hooved beast, not
because it knows of a distant glen where cotton
has shed its husks, the “recluse” its sting, but
in the duty of instinct to flinch at shadows.
Now too must I, judged and dispossessed,
grasp at duty, bite at my yoke, join my path
to His, reversing along my history and man’s:
calling not Jehovah, Elohim, Joshua,
but the One before these, the first obliterie.

Rip Underwood has owned a dental lab for many years but has retired and wishes to devote his energies to finding outlets for his poetry – a passion he has indulged in for most of his adult life. In Austin, he has done volunteer work with deaf clients and with developmentally disabled residents at our Austin State School. He has also done service at the local women’s shelter and the Victim Services division of the Austin police department. He enjoys a good socially-directed volunteer opportunity but now wishes to explore a more inward artistic journey and to see if the work he has accumulated has a place in the world. His poems have been published in Poet’s Choice, Poetry Super Highway, Volney Road Review, Change Seven, and The Bloom.