Poetry December 2007 | issue 384

The Sweet Hereafter

by Adrie Kusserow

ADRIE KUSSEROW lives in Underhill Center, Vermont, and teaches anthropology at St. Michael’s College. Her book of poems is called Hunting Down the Monk (BOA Editions). She and her husband cofounded the New Sudan Education Initiative, which has built the first school for girls in Yei, Sudan.

All selections by this author

It seems I am no monk.
It turns out I cannot sit with suffering
without saddling it with an ill-fitting God.

Who knows what tipped me over,
another Christmas and its neon grin,
the living dead at Wal-Mart
pushing their loaded carts through the aisles,
the class I taught on child soldiers in Uganda,
the way the Lord’s Resistance Army kidnaps boys
and forces them to beat another child to death. Each day
a new boy in the camp is chosen. I sat there, after the lecture,
wondering what happens to the body:
is it pounded like steak until it is limp and soft,
and how do they kill a child with such small fists and feet?
As the boy looks up through the pummeling does he
see a kind of God waiting for him, smiling?
Does he know instinctively, like the bee
and the hummingbird, how to find nectar?

I need to know —
one day, will it happen; will I swallow a God who can handle all of this,
my eyes watering as I hold Him down?
Will the bitter potion
turn to wine
and I feel warm and giddy,
sitting in the front pew of the Church of the Holy Light,
the sun’s giant paw resting on my back?

In spring,
my mother will die.
I will smell another impossibly thick
fist of cherry blossom.
When I take her body into the woods,
when I think I can’t bear the loss, the light fading,
and I sink to my knees, will there be a God
that I move toward like nectar,
or will a God surface from within?

What I want is this:
after they lower her body into the earth,
I won’t believe my good fortune
when a God shows up
and lets down His rain of reassurance,
and I sit in awe,
like the first time my milk came in,
and I lay there
in the moss,
my whole blouse sopping.