After Bells, After Drums—Mischa Willett

"It isn’t doubt when suffering seizes the hilltop of your heart..."

Stack Takeover: Mischa Willett. Over the next two months, we’ll be reading poetry from Mischa every week, including four poems published for the first time on this Substack. For an introduction to Mischa, read Ben Palpant’s interview with him here.

After Bells, After Drums

after Marvin Bell

It’s faith that’s easy: praying, reading, fasting, loving, feasting are hard. 

It’s faith that falls like fog around us, everywhere softening the edges, filling our bodies with the cool, wet, web of existence and extra-sensory presence that is. 

It’s faith, not ethics, that stretches the ankle strap of a sandal, opens the hand to offer a benediction, coaxes the dough to rise.

And it’s faith, just faith, that makes you stand straight in a city that hunches along its river, its concrete spine, because the column of air that supports you is a gift and an orientation, a heaven inside. 

It isn’t doubt when suffering seizes the hilltop of your heart or when the fireplace of ashes misses the heat that made it—when in the traffic you simply can’t hear a thing or the way is unclear—none of that is doubt. 

It’s faith, when you come to it, that asks of us everything, that empties and empties until we are full, that fills the gnaw in the gut, dispels the cloud of mind, that runs out the money-changers in the forecourt, that names.

It’s faith, not duty, that takes the self off the altar of worship, leaving both open to occupation.

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Mischa Willett (Ph.D.) is the author of two books of poetry, including The Elegy Beta (2020) and Phases (2017) as well as of essays, translations, and reviews that appear in both popular and academic journals. A specialist in nineteenth-century aesthetics, he teaches English at Seattle Pacific University.