Reconsidering god

By Dennise Gackstetter

Issue 46 • Fall 2022 • Poetry

3rd Place Poetry

2022 Summer Contest

I love the infectious joy and freedom embodied in this poem, and the way this speaker not only “reconsiders” god, but also reclaims that fraught word, literally meditating in the final stanza on the sounds of it. For me, this poem helps to expand “the possibilities of divinity,” especially by explaining how this preferred version of god would “dance in the wide margins, skipping from white space/to white space.” The speaker here is talking about the delight of writing poetry, and of finding god and the creator in the experience of creation on the page. Yet this also serves as a metaphor for the kind of god that does not stay static, contained only in ideas, “shuttered between heavy covers.” This god does not “lurk in tall tales,” but instead enlarges our notions of what a single word—and what we can contain as well. One can’t help but hear echoes of Walt Whitman throughout this open-armed poem, which urges us to look beyond our old, “stony” ideas of what a more expressive, joyful spirituality might look like.

-James Crews

I cannot believe
in the god that lurks
in the tall tales
on the dark crowded pages
shuttered between heavy covers
of tarnished gilded books.

The god I could
believe in would
dance in the wide margins,
skipping from white space
to white space until
the pages’ edge, and then
with arms wide
take an elegant leap
into the unknown.

I cannot even use
the word “god.”
It is too small a word
to contain all the
possibilities of divinity.
It is a stony sounding word,
bounded at both ends
by two hard consonants
that strain to compress
the small “o” that is
an exhale of delight,
the “ahhhh” of wonder,
the first sound of joy.

Dennise Gackstetter

Dennise Gackstetter is a visual artist, writer, and educator whose current day job is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Art & Design at Utah State University. Her artwork has been exhibited in many venues regionally and nationally. Her writing has been published nationally and regionally including Studio Potter magazine and A Celebration of Cache Valley Voices. She has taught in public schools, colleges, and universities regionally, nationally, and internationally including Japan, Cuba, and Czech Republic. Always interested in narrative, she seeks the stories hidden beneath the surface and in the folds of everyday life.

Francesca Busalla

Francesca Busalla is an Italian multidisciplinary artist. She grew up in Sardinia in a family of artists. These early influences motivated her to pursue her career initially as hair stylist and graphic designer and subsequently in fine art.