Lucifer's Beginning Poetry Workshop

Lucifer loves the beginners.
He loves how their hands shake

as they pull their Xeroxed drafts
from their untattered folders,

and the way, bright as they are,
it takes them two months to learn

to pass those poems to their peers
in an organized fashion. It reminds him

of creation, the galactic mess
spinning from his Father’s hands—

hands beyond holding, as white
as starlight, unblemished

but for long-bitten nails.
He likes to read the descriptions

of his students’ fathers’ hands, huge
and calloused with labor, as if

they’d done something new
beneath the sun. He savors

their familiar emotions,
the familiar deserted woods

where each walks a well-beaten path
they insist is less-traveled.

Give up, he tells each one,
Try law, medicine, the clergy—

even God had the modesty,
after making this first failed world,

to take a rest. But in truth,
he applauds how they go on,

how week after week
the dreadful drafts are brought forth...

Lucifer reads them all
and calls them good.

Copyright © 2008 Philip Memmer All rights reserved
from The American Poetry Journal
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission