Alphabet
Each letter from A to Z, Alpha to Omega
waits, half day, half night, to spell a blessing
or catastrophe. All that happened or will
forms in the assembly of 26 small symbols
of the alphabet, like floating letters made
of flour in a child’s bowl of soup, expressing
all deliverance or doom. God, all light, spoke
the Word and our world began, though Carl
Jung in “Answer to Job” suggests the deity
bears a shadow within and casts it outward
onto the world. That shadow is in everything,
in these words, these letters, bright and dark.
Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart Prize nominations in 2010, 12, and 2014. Poems have appeared in Word Riot, Oklahoma Review, Pacific Review and other magazines and received Sharkpack Review Annual’s 2014 Prospero Prize and a 2014 Pushcart nomination.