An Overness / Aaron's end

Hello all,

Here we are at Aaron’s end, in the biblical story. I’ve attempted to draw our attention to this man, who, more often than not, seems to be simply the “end of an and.”

But, slowing down and discovering where he shows up in the pages of the Bible, and then attempting to give voice to that in poetry, has been a wonderful experience for me, and I hope for you.

Here’s the poem~

IX.

Aaron’s
final exaltation:
beckoned up the Mountain
of mountains to die. Stripped of sacred
robes, his son adorned, his staff a tree, alive
in the sanctuary, while he lays down the Promise
and the Land, at Yahweh’s command. Come to love Aaron
as more than an end to a great and: Moses and Aaron. Moses and
Aaron.

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If you’d like to start back at the beginning of Aaron’s epic, here ya go. It was wild to discover that I started writing it back in March!

Next, we’re moving into Deuteronomy. At this rate, it will take me 17 years and 10 months to get through the entire Bible in this Overness series. Who’s with me?!

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Further up & further in,

Anna

p.s. Do you all know about Lifting the Veil, the Malcolm Guite curated conference coming to Boston this October? Though I’ve known Malcolm for 10+ years, this will be the first time I’ve ever shared a stage with him. Saturday’s schedule for the conference includes a “Poets in the Round” where I will get to read some of my poems alongside Malcolm and Joshua Luke Smith! Y’all. Boston in October is already glorious. Do come if you can!! Tonight, I’m hosting a dinner in my home for some of the Lifting the Veil planning team, an amazing crew ~

Here’s a photo from the week I first met Malcolm, back in 2015, at Regent College in Vancouver, BC. I wrote three sonnets for a class I took with him, and he encouraged me to consider submitting them for publication to CRUX, Regent’s theological journal. They accepted one, a sonnet about my ongoing wrestling with God in reading the Bible (a prophetic moment if ever I lived one) and included a line about the “sweet and bitter scroll.”