If you ask me, Lucille Clifton’s “brothers” is perhaps the oddest poem written about God.
The poet tells us this is “a conversation in eight poems between an aged Lucifer and God, though only Lucifer is heard.” It’s not really a conversation — more of an encounter — recalled long ago. God and Lucifer, in Lucifer’s view, are brothers.
Lucifer invites God to “coil” with him — an interesting word — and rest:
let us rest here a time
like two old brothers
who watched it happen and wondered
what it meant.
Brothers feel entitled to tell brothers where they failed, and Lucifer brings up the creation of human beings, allegedly in God’s own image.
listen. You are beyond
even Your own understanding.
that rib and rain and clay
in all its pride,
its unsteady dominion,
is not what you believed
You were,
but it is what You are…
Lucifer sees his brother in humans: in the desire to do things that can’t be done and in
the loneliness, the perfect
imperfection.
Lucifer followed mankind without fear. He followed man and woman as they left the garden, punished for being their father’s children. Lucifer accepted human life, its joy, its pain. What Lucifer can’t fathom is why, when things went horribly wrong, God never intervened.
As in the rest of the poem, there is no reply. It’s a monolog, rather than a conversation. In the silence, Lucifer concludes two things: that there must be mercy and that God has no need to speak.
• Source: You can find “brothers” here:
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