When the silent Lord turned His back
on my offering and smiled over my brother's
heap of slaughtered lambs, something thick
and warm rose in my throat. I choked it back-
it was not rage that made me take his life.
I grew calm and tried to think, to understand
my God's hard design. I could only reason
that the Lord loved the blood, loved death itself.
For a moment, I even thought of making an offering
of Abel on the very same alter, mixing his blood
with his flock's ashes, spelling out YAHWEH
in the dark muck. But I could imagine judgment,
could see Him turning away again. I remembered then
what mother had said: that He plays with us, planting
the most beautiful trees in the center of our world
and making them forbidden. She said the Fall
was His idea. How could I doubt that now?
In the end, though, it was not anger or thought
that led to this. I simply gave myself up to Him.
When I lifted that sheep's skull to the sky
and brought it down on my brother's head,
I was just being the rough beast that the Lord had made.
My God, my God--He sowed deep that hard seed
of death. I merely reaped its dark red fruit.
- free- verse
- appears the writer is very familiar and knowledgeable about the biblical story of Cain and Abel
- writer uses that knowledge to provide a new look/perspective on the story by telling the story from Cain's point of view
- author does well with displacement
- author uses postmodern irony within throughout the discourse of the poem
- author also juggles well with the irreverence
- Albergotti uses voice to gain advantage in his poem. Like in our class text, Albergotti works with voice in a way that "evolves from combinations of the personal and the public, the emergent and the established" (47).
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