The news isn’t all bad. July and Augustwere the hottest months in human history,but a family found the pet tortoisethat went missing in 1982. The low cloudabove me passes under the high cloudslike a souped-up Civic passing on the right.I’ve been all over this island and stillhave no names for most of the trees.Despite the urgings of good peopleI do not find Job comforting: all thatswag and bluster, mean and uselessas Oz before Toto pulls the curtain.The plenitude and manifold textureof things, this comforts me a little.My old friend is in a hospice bed,his beard gray and wispy.His blond granddaughters, both bornmonths early, are up too soon,happily demanding love and cereal.The low cloud is nearly past,the high clouds are scattered and litby the early sun. Not everyone is safe.Not everyone is warm. “God is not big;He is right,” that wise fool William Staffordhad the dandelions say, but they werealready drying up, forgettingeverything, loosing their frothy seedsto scatter and settle as they might.
God Is Not Right, He Is Big
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Copyright © 2019 by Jeff Gundy
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jeff Gundy’s eighth book of poems, Without a Plea, was published in early 2019 by Bottom Dog Press. Recent poems and essays are in Cincinnati Review, River Teeth, Forklift, Ohio, Terrain, and Christian Century. He is at work on a series of lyric essays about the Illinois prairie with the working title “Wind Farm.”
Summer 2019
Atlanta, Georgia
University of Georgia
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The Georgia Review is the literary-cultural journal published out of the University of Georgia since 1947. While it began with a regional commitment, its scope has grown to include readers and writers throughout the U.S. and the world, who are brought together through the print journal as well as live programming. Convinced that communities thrive when built on dialogue that honors the difference between any two interlocutors, we publish imaginative work that challenges us to reconsider any line, distinction, or thought in danger of becoming too rigid or neat, so that our readers can continue the conversations in their own lives.
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