Last night the Angel came again
and demanded as he had long ago,
Write, Caedmon, write the Creation,
and what could the old cowherd do
but sign up next to last, 32
of 33, and slide onto the one empty
metal chair and watch
his watch inch towards 8:15.
Perhaps some hairy sonneteer
would crown his two minutes at the mic
and the host, with her own three-pager,
would pre-empt Caedmon’s spot.
Besides wasn’t everyone already writing Creation
in this free-fall, post-covid, crash-bash world—sad sestinas
of shrapnel and gauze, villanelles of dead babes
tucked to mothers’ breasts, police pantoums?
And wasn’t Caedmon listening to it all:
Adam whining about his bruised heels,
Homer carping about his malfunctioning Brailler,
Emily lamenting the vanishing frogs and bogs?
Oh, Caedmon knew evil was part of the world,
but he was getting tired of the long-winded
lady naming each camel who spat at her
during her trek across the Sahara
and of the trans-teen who was berating
their co-workers because one had asked
why anyone would choose to be a woman
in this male-chauvinistic hell hole of a world
and now the English drama queen detailing
her trauma at losing her cell phone
on a bus in Bangalore—all the songsters
warbling their high-strung songs.
8:47 pm. Did the damn Angel really think
one more poem would save Creation?
Poor Caedmon didn’t have the slightest
what he could sing to lighten
the suffering of the world.
The story of Caedmon is found in the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He was an illiterate cowherd whom an angel demanded to sing, despite his protestations that he could not sing.
