Eric Reymond

Eric Reymond is Lector of Biblical Hebrew at Yale Divinity School. His professional research concerns ancient poetry and literary expression, especially among the Dead Sea Scrolls. His second book on the subject, New Idioms within Old: Poetry and Parallelism in the Non-Masoretic Poems of 11Q5(= 11QPs^a), was published in 2011. His creative work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Denver Quarterly, New South, and The Portland Review.

Real Conditional

Of all the things we could meet to talk about today—

the storm turning off the coast of Mexico
how it must look, if viewed
from outer space

thrown star? doughnut? lifering? white hole?

                    or the spectacle
of miners lifted
after two months
          through 2000 feet of mantle
that had sealed them in
               like a planetary organ

or even the continual decrease of the world's known
languages, two already dead since the miners were trapped

—we must talk about how poorly
               we have faired on the exam

to still not know the common plural

or how similar the conjugations
          that express what is real