Poem of the Week | July 24, 2017

This week, we are excited to offer a new poem by Amanda Hawkins. Hawkins’ poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Orion, Watershed Review, CRUX, The Yolo Crow, Edible Sacramento, and Christianity and Literature. She received her Master of Arts in Theological Studies from Regent College, and her work has been supported by Dorland Mountain Arts Colony and a scholarship from Napa Valley Writer’s Conference. She now teaches writing at William Jessup University, is at work on a book of poetry and a book of prose, and lives with her beloved and two children in Northern California.

Author’s note:

I wrote this poem in the crucible of my first writer’s conference. I had spent the prior six months writing a full draft of my current poetry manuscript—producing two to four poems a week—and I thought I knew daily writing. But at the conference we drafted and workshopped a new poem every day, and the intensity required to climb into the marrow of a poem so fast and so utterly in public meant I had no time for avoidance or wizardry. My images—and my manuscript, the poems I wrote, even I as a person—at once and painfully broke, and the questions and suggestions that had quietly roamed through my poems finally took form. I have a strained relationship with my religious history and tend to want to run in the opposite direction of those subjects. I wrote the poem in a moment of exhaustion.

This poem is about many things, but at its conception it was about that breaking point–right before a person or prophet changes direction and follows a call. Prophets and their stories tend to take on mythological proportions, but in the end even Jonah is just a person who has something to say. The poem is about the longing to fulfill that call and facing what it would mean to change.