Angels I’ve Known
Paradise Lost pulled from school libraries in Florida,
Satan’s disobedience, seduction, trickery tossed
onto the book discard cart, furious
angels winging close behind with their
placards and chants and lawsuits.
Devilish knowledge swept from waxed oak shelves.
“Hence I will excite their minds/
With more desire to know.”
Somewhere Milton stirs.
In the collision between Heaven and Earth
I put my faith in earth,
mud-mucked hands, a bed where I’m hoping
lettuce will appear, and chard.
Can we still believe in gardens?
Soil, a place for upheaval, spading into light
the moist underlayer. The vertical rungs
of the world upside down, I’ve always thought,
fire and brimstone below earth
below air below radiance, when it’s mud
that matters most. No way to improve
on mud, even Satan knew that, dragging
his vengeful self from Hell to Earth,
coiling through roses and myrrh to subvert,
tonguing the dirt to entice Eve with his dare,
a tongue-dart as salacious, as world-beginning
and world-ending as any snatched kiss
behind Mrs. Bender’s 6th grade classroom
in our fallen world. What of Milton’s rebellious
vision? Gone to garbage truck’s grinding gears,
to mud, raucous gulls circling.
Dorothy Wall is author of an essay collection and two books of poetry, most recently Catalogue of Surprises (Blue Light Press, 2023). A Best of the Net nominee, her poems and essays have appeared in Witness, Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, and others. She has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University and University of California, Berkeley Extension. More at www.dorothywall.com.
Read other Letters to America online or in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published in partnership with Trinity University Press.
Header photo by MabelAmber, courtesy Pixabay.
