Contributor’s Marginalia: Maggie Smith on “God” by Michael Bazzett

This counterintuitive opening of Michael Bazzett’s sonnet-esque poem, with its matter-of-fact, colloquial diction, won me over immediately: God and the speaker do not believe in one another, yet they are together. The speaker claims, “I just like having someone there in the dark.” The speaker, if he indeed does not believe, is not looking to be kept safe in the afterlife; he wants God for company and comfort here in the present, like a friend or, yes, like a father.

What I admire most about this poem is the layering of metaphor. The prayers are made physical, objects that are trapped in the room, prayers that got stuck to the ceiling on their way up and never got where they were going. Then God expounds upon the speaker’s metaphor with his own simile: “It’s almost like finding old piñata candy, says God.” I love that what God compares prayers to is something we can’t imagine God has any experience with: stale candy found on the floor long after a piñata has been broken open.

God is so human in this poem—and isn’t “human” another way of saying “fallible” or “imperfect,” the exact opposite of what God is said to be? He opens the stale, perhaps forgotten prayer, and winces at the taste of it—and why? Is it cloying sweetness? Or is it so old, it’s turned?

The next moment in the poem moves me because of what it might suggest. God “[n]ods like he’s just remembered something/ for the thousandth, thousandth time.” Is the prayer something he’s heard before, from this person—the person whose room this is—or from someone else? So many of our prayers must be similar if not identical: Please make him well, please don’t let her die, please don’t let him leave us, please save me.

And what is God’s reaction to this taste, this memory? His eyes do not well up with tears. He doesn’t express sadness or remorse or regret for not having received this particular prayer. “It’s kind of like chewing/ tinfoil, he says. All that aching naked hope.”

I admire Bazzett’s masterful line break that creates suspense after “chewing,” and the music of the long vowels at the end of the poem, especially the long A assonance in “aching naked.” The music of the words runs counter to the harshness of the sentiment: that, frankly, others’ hope and pain and earnest pleas are hard to swallow.

What Bazzett accomplishes in this poem—in only fourteen lines—is inspiring. This is a poem I wish I’d written. This is a poem that makes me want to write.