Poem: Holy Fool

Holy Fool
His wife is a heifer, a young cow, who has bowed to the yoke and served her enemies. ‘Plowing’ does double service as both an agricultural and a sexual metaphor. The common element is penetration, and illicit use of Samson’s ‘property.’
-The Book of Judges, B. G. Webb

I. Fire & Air

Only because you dared to plow
With my unmilked, unbred cow
Did your sticky devouring minds 
My bee-lion riddle unwind.

Three hundred foxes’ tails I tie
And just as many fires fly,
They lick out in tongue-driven craze:
Stand still there and watch the blaze. 

Now you’ve burnt my wife along with her sire,
I’ll kill every man who was at that fire.
I strike hip and thigh until no man is left,
And go down to Etam to dwell in the cleft.

II. Earth & Water

Leave me down here all alone
Or I’ll speak in dreadful donkey’s bone:
“To hear the judge they had to die,
Heaps on heaps, all piled high.”

My words are done, I cast from my hand
The jaw for which I name this land.
And now in this place of slaughter and sword,
I long to have some water, Lord.

He gouges the cleft and the hollow is wet.
He judges twenty years, oh he judges twenty years.