Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day One: Compline

Sand Opera Lenten Journey

Day One

From Joel, Chapter 2:

Even now, says the LORD,
return to me with your whole heart,
with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;
Rend your hearts, not your garments,
and return to the LORD, your God.
For gracious and merciful is God,
slow to anger, rich in kindness….

Opening Thoughts

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Today is Ash Wednesday. I remember the awe and confusion I felt as a child, approaching the priest to receive an ashen cross on my forehead. It was a reminder of our mortality, and I did not know the first thing about death. That we are given this small span, as Blake once wrote, to bear the beams of love. I’ve always had a quarrel with Lent, the idea of fasting and penitence in winter. Living in Cleveland, I experience Lent during the months when my energy is lowest, my mood’s tending toward darkness. Winter’s incessantly gray skies, its icy sidewalks, and sometimes sub-zero temperatures make it hazardously physically and emotionally.  I already tend toward the masochistic. Shouldn’t I be practicing “hygge”? Probably.

Traditionally, Lent asks its pilgrims to take on some act of penance, some act of fasting. Not too long ago, it meant “giving something up”—chocolate, television, the internet—some bit of worldly pleasure that might keep us from dwelling with ultimate things. More recently, people have begun performing acts that might bring us closer to God. This year, I wanted to enter into the Lenten mystery more fully. To return, as the Hebrew prophet Joel invites, with a whole heart, despite (or perhaps through) my brokenness.

In some sense, Sand Opera, which began when I started “writing through” the Abu Ghraib story, was both a “giving up” and an act of penitential witness. When faced with the problem of evil, the theodicy that was the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, I found myself closer to the mystery of suffering and the demonic forces of unchecked power in war. I wrote these poems to read them, and now I read them again to write them. To return again to the questions that they ask.

Today, I’m sharing "Compline," the last poem of Sand Opera, and poet Luke Hankins’ reflections.

“Compline” by Philip Metres     

That we await a blessed hope, & that we will be struck

With great fear, like a baby taken into the night, that every boot,

Every improvised explosive, Talon & Hornet, Molotov

& rubber-coated bullet, every unexploded cluster bomblet,

Every Kevlar & suicide vest & unpiloted drone raining fire

On wedding parties will be burned as fuel in the dark season.

That we will learn the awful hunger of God, the nerve-fraying

Cry of God, the curdy vomit of God, the soiled swaddle of God,

The constant wakefulness of God, alongside the sweet scalp

Of God, the contented murmur of God, the limb-twitched dream-

Reaching of God. We’re dizzy in every departure, limb-lost.

We cannot sleep in the wake of God, & God will not sleep

The infant dream for long. We lift the blinds, look out into ink

For light. My God, my God, open the spine binding our sight.

First published in Poetry (February 2012). From Sand Opera (2015)

On “Compline,” by Luke Hankins

“I will not keep silent.”

Perhaps no other phrase is more emblematic of Western religious traditions at their points of intersection with lived experience. Praise and lament, petition and complaint all arise from the human impulse to assert one’s voice—even on the largest scale, before the very Creator.

“I will not keep silent,” Job cries. “I will speak out in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.” (Job 7:11; see also The Holy Qur’an, Ṣād 38:41)

In Sand Opera, Philip Metres inhabits and extends this tradition, voicing not only his own outcry as an Arab American living in the post-9/11 era, but seeking to bring the silenced and molested voices of victims of the War on Terror to a wide audience—but not in any straightforward or facile way. Many of Metres’ compositional techniques imitate the very offenses—imprisonment, torture, erasure—that they lament. In so doing, the reader arrives along with the author at a place of anguish over our contemporary state of affairs.

Again, let me emphasize that Metres’ work is anything but one-sided, facile, or selective in its vision or empathy. Alongside the voices of Middle Eastern victims in Abu Ghraib, the reader will find voices like those of a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan who took part in the arrest of a murderer of both children and adults, but who ultimately was forced by absurd government and military policy to release him because they were only authorized to detain “terrorists” and “insurgents,” not mere murderers. “I had looked directly into the eyes of evil,” he says, “and could do nothing about it.”

In the final poem of Sand Opera, “Compline”—an evening prayer—Metres writes:

“[W]e will learn the awful hunger of God, the nerve-fraying

Cry of God, the curdy vomit of God, the soiled swaddle of God,

The constant wakefulness of God, alongside the sweet scalp

Of God, the contented murmur of God, the limb-twitched dream-

Reaching of God. We’re dizzy in every departure, limb-lost.

We cannot sleep in the wake of God, & God will not sleep

The infant dream for long. We lift the blinds, look out into ink

For light. My God, my God, open the spine binding our sight.”

Metres locates God here among and within us. When a newborn sleeps, God partakes in that peace. When an Abu Ghraib prisoner is violated, so is God. When a soldier is compelled to act against her conscience, God is taken advantage of. When we blind ourselves to the realities of modern warfare, nation-building, and “homeland security,” we are attempting to cover the very eyes of God. Cry out all we like, until we remove the veil from our eyes and confront the world as it is, we will receive no illumination from above.

Metres’ poems can help us see, can help us learn to voice our complaint and that of others—and can help us learn to take the work we ask of God as our own highest calling. It can teach us anew the truth of Jesus’ words, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

--Luke Hankins is the author of a collection of poems, Weak Devotions, and the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets. His latest book is The Work of Creation: Selected Prose. He is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.