Is it just me, or was that tree more than just a tree?

The small fact that changed the way I read Sarah's story and sparked this week's poem.

If it seems like I’ve put a lot of importance on trees in my poems, I have! (And there’s a reason.) Photo by Damian Denis on Unsplash

Finally, at age 90, Sarah’s pregnancy is announced in Genesis, Chapter 18.

The news is heralded by a visit from three mysterious strangers, who find Abraham sitting beneath a tree.

These are no ordinary strangers. In fact, they turn out to be messengers of God.

And this is no ordinary tree either. Abraham is sitting beneath a terebinth tree, whose name in Hebrew (elah) is often translated as oak. Elah is the feminine version of el, which is a name for God. So, elah can be translated as Goddess.

That’s right: Abraham is sitting beneath the russet canopy of a Goddess Tree when he receives the news that his wife is about to become, miraculously in her old age, a mother — and the mother of nations.

This small fact makes a world of difference in how I read Genesis Chapter 18, which opens with these lines:

“God appeared to him by the terebinths of Mamre; he was sitting at the entrance of the tent as the day grew hot.”

I pondered those words, and this line from the chapter as I wrote my poem:

“So, Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah. ‘Quick’ he said, ‘knead some of the best flour and bake some cakes.’”

As you listen to my poem “So, Abraham,” note the inclusion of words from the verse I quoted above. They appear in order as the end words for each line.

Listen to this week’s poem, “So, Abraham”

“So, Abraham,” by Tzivia Gover. All Rights Reserved, Copyright Tzivia Gover, Third House Moon, LLC

(For the poets, poetry lovers, and poem-curious, I’ve included more information on how this poem was constructed below.)

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Notes on “So, Abraham”

More about those trees

If it seems like I’ve put a lot of emphasis on the trees in this passage, I have! Read more about the importance of trees in this story and what they can tell us about the power of nature and the divine feminine in biblical texts:

The Word is Wood

About the poetic form

“So, Abraham,” is a golden shovel poem. Like a sonnet or a villanelle, a golden shovel is a poetic form whose rules and constraints, paradoxically, free the poet to enter new, and often surprising, territory.

I described this form in a previous post like this:

When I write in the form of the golden shovel, as I have with a handful of poems in this collection (including today’s poem), I feel as though I’m pressing backward into the lines.

In a golden shovel, the poet uses the words from a short poem (or a few lines from a longer one), one by one in the order in which they appear, to complete each line of the new creation.

In this case, I use Bible verses instead of other people’s poems to complete the form.

Read the whole post here:

Inversion, Irony, and Turning Verses Inside Out.

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