Michael T. Young

POETRY

Endlessly Only

I tried once not to believe in God.
I was a teenager performing a thought experiment:
what if there were no God?

But then every time I thought of
his absence, there was a sunset
or a tree shaking its limbs violently

saying, listen, don’t you hear him calling you
everywhere? But I played deaf
and sat in that same tree later reading,

learning about black holes ripping nearby suns
into ribbons of fire, about an infinite universe
that began with the only explosion

not to shred everything into an unsolvable puzzle,
or atoms that we’ve looked at so closely
we discovered in them vast empty spaces,

a nothing from which only God could make
something, and a nothing still there at the heart
of everything and kept from collapsing

back into nothing or us from falling
and falling through it all endlessly only
by God’s love lifting us and holding it together.

Finding My Childhood

All day, the ocean dashed its store of jade
and sapphire ornaments along the beach.
It never ran out, and its waves never
stopped declaring that there is no wealth
or beauty greater than its own force.
And I found such pleasure in yielding to it,
being tossed by its many strong hands,
that I was reminded of God whose abundance
has no end, whose provision is a vastness
I wade into, yielding to his embracing power,
to find the joy and playfulness of the child I am.

The Dirty Work of Blessing

There are rats in the basement walls.
I set traps. Their jaws
snatch the life from some, others
catch just a leg and they squeal for me
to come and steal the rest.

My son doesn’t know.
It’s something I do without mention:
this hard business cleaning out
the lurking threats, so he
can be blessed.

Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. His previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, received the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including Pinyon, Talking River Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Vox Populi.