A Creature of All Scripture

Tell me, you whom I love so well;
Where do you pasture your sheep?
Song of Songs 1:7

Marrying a Christian, she feels like a sheep
stuck on some ancient hill. The field quakes
with her ancestors’ crusade.
She calls to Abraham, faith’s
shepherd, to drag her love
and her away. They shout Abraham!
with equal weight in both
their prayerful mouths. Their tribesmen count
the flock apart — as hers, as his.

Rachel Mennies is the author of “The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards,” Texas Tech University Press (2014), winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry. She teaches at Carnegie Mellon University and is a member of AGNI’s editorial staff.