By Brendon Sylvester
Keep watch with me:
watch in the darkest watches of the night,
when watching’s watch-word’s “waiting,”
waiting for enough dim light
to grey the far-off edges of the night
enough for us to blink, and count the sheep, and sigh…
keep watch with me when the wan moon hides her face,
when the sleeping sheep make easy prey,
and the stars like sheep keep pasture out in space.
The rabbis tell me David was a shepherd too.
A proud profession, lad, and true,
he, too, kept watch for stupid, thankless sheep
against the lion and the bear. But he
was not so much a shepherd as a king.
His were wars, betrayals, and every prominent thing.
He was too great to keep a shepherd’s cares:
shearing, shovelling, stillborn ewes, long aches—
the agony of staying awake.
Papa says Jacob was a better shepherd.
He was a weary man, a speck
beneath the sky all swirled with unnamed stars,
crawling the virgin vastness of the world.
That is every shepherd’s doom, in the end:
a sojourner in pastures who descends
in valleys far from eyes and hours and hearths
where he can imagine himself the only man on earth.
Sometimes I wonder if Jacob really saw
the angels climbing and descending from God’s gate,
if he really slept in the camp of God,
really wrestled God and won,
or if, despairing, he only dreamed
of a veil drawn back,
dreamed there was ever anything to veil,
dreamed that somewhere behind the cold and black,
behind the stink, the whelped lamb’s wail,
there lurked, might any moment strike
some fierce and secret lightning of the Lord.
I have often dreamed of some such lightning.
I have often fancied myself wrestling with God,
have often nodded, dozed, dreamt for one wild moment glory—
only to find I’m grappling with the air,
only to wake, and, glancing wildly around,
find the world still empty, coarse, and bare.
But never mind all that.
We have a watch to keep, you and I.
Let us go under the black, cold sky
to wait in the field till the dawn’s hushed light,
and keep watch over our flocks by night.
Brendon Sylvester is a poet and writer based near Philadelphia, PA. He studied at the Torrey Honors College, where the likes of Edmund Spenser, Augustine, and the landscapes of the American National Parks influenced his imagination. His writing has appeared in Ekstasis, Touchstone, the Amethyst Review and elsewhere. He currently serves as a poetry editor for the Anselm Society.