Supernatural Forces

“The absence of God,” wrote Georges Bataille,
“is greater, and more divine, than God.”
Which is an idea God might have come up with
if he’d been French and worried
about how to make it through
the twentieth century. Do you want this?
If I take it away, will you want it more?

Or will you forget? That’s the problem
with absence, it leaves itself open
to so much. Supernatural forces,
for example. Glowing lights,
out of which the aliens appear
like anorexic children. Let us help you,
they say, although of course they never speak.

Once they just wanted to take over the planet.
Now they feel sorry for us,
the way God must have felt when he chose
to retire into his silence.
No more threats. No more angels, either.
Only these lost children, come back
to startle us, and vanish.

Lawrence Raab is the author of six collectionsof poems, including What We Don’t Know about Each Other (winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Book Award), The Probably World, and most recently Visible Signs: New and Selected Poems, all published by Penguin. A new collection, The History of Forgetting, will appear from Penguin in 2009. He teaches iterature and writing at Williams College.

“Supernatural Forces” appears in our Winter 2007 issue.