Bob Rees
. . . God, who thinks about
poetry all the time, breathes happily as He
repeats to himself: There are fish in the net,
lots of fish this time in the net of the heart.
—Linda Gregg, “Fishing in the Keep of Silence”
Because he thinks about poetry
all the time,
and writes it whenever he can,
God,
who imagined everything
before he sang it into light,
said to the angels,
“In that Kingdom of Stars
I will come
with words and wonders,
visit them
in rhythms and rhymes,
in epics and elegies,
which they will catch
in the nets of their hearts
and sing back to
creation.
“To those in the Kingdom of Moons
I will send stars and suns,
sonnets and sonatas,
so that they too
may send music
spinning
into space
and echoing
among nebulae,
worlds without end.
“To those in the Kingdom of Suns
who sang my beauty
and glory
to a world fallen into night,
I will send
luminous moons and stars,
golden galaxies and supernovae
so that the poetry
of all my kingdoms.
the music of all my spheres.
will reach even to outer darkness—
to the black holes
of memory—
where it will
resound and ring,
infiltrate
even the dark deaf ears
of Perdition.”
Bob Rees is Director and Visiting Professor of Mormon Studies at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Previously, he taught at UCLA, UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley. He is the author and editor of numerous studies on Mormonism. His collection of poetry, Waiting for Morning, was published in 2017 by Zarahemla Press.