When Amichai ends a poem with “Hallelujah,”

I want to rush in and inhabit the word, not

to steal it from him but to abide with him.

Ours has been a life of crumbling mountains,

of eroding seashores, of men hurrying toward

sanctuaries to annihilate what others believe.

What, then, must our duty be to a language

too soon reaching the end of itself? Psalms

remind how broken our attempts at healing are.

By now we should have learned from springs

how we rise up out of the dust for a while,

then, without warning, dive back underground.

Wherever we are, we wander a distant land.

More often than not, our joys convict us. We’re

still trying to believe the first words Adam spoke.

Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, and No Other Kind of World. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in The Southern Review, Bennington Review, Image, The Laurel Review, The Louisville Review, Poetry South, Literary Matters, Southern Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Zone 3, Cutleaf, and others. He lives and teaches in TN.