Another new poem up at the Best American Poetry blog. This one's called Psalm of Assent, and makes use of a line donated by Kate Abbott, who wrote me a beautiful sestina once.

The title is a play on psalm 126, "a song of ascents," which begins "When Adonai returned us to Zion we were as dreamers..." And the third stanza nods to that famous line from Pirkei Avot.

The burly men are real; my friend David and I met for dinner at a pub on rural route 43 this week, and the place was packed both with those who had neither light nor heat at home and by crews of roving electric company workers. Our waitress admitted she had trouble understanding some of the men who'd come from far afield, which I found strangely poignant.

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