A Handpicked Poem
presented by Michael Steffen
from Rattle Fall 2026 (presented online 23 September 2026)
Psalm 131
by George David Clark
My heart is not proud.
I am satisfied with generic cereal.
I drive a Toyota Camry
to work in the right-hand lane
and do not rush
through yellow traffic lights.
My most important meetings
are not important
to the welfare of states
or peoples or businesses.
They mean nothing
to the ebb and flow of history,
and somehow less
to today’s financial markets.
Lawyers look through me
and bankers, makers
of deals. As they should.
Strong men and beautiful women
see all the way through me
as though I were dust
set briefly in motion by wind,
which I am.
I am not proud of heart,
not very. But I woke early
this morning for an audience
with the Most High God
in which we decided
after some dispute
that He would keep doing
what He’s been doing
since the earth was young:
putting sleeves of ice
on the limbs of dogwood
and taking them off again,
sending the nuthatch
and the chickadee to sift
sunflower seeds in the feeder,
smiling on the wicked and a few
of the just, and stabbing
my prideful heart
invisibly, twisting the icicle
blade and ruffling
the hair I just combed.
That’s fine. That’s fine.
Frees me to ignore
what the president’s up to,
to forget the celebrities
who every once in a while
stop hating me just long enough
to demand my love and attention,
to neglect the mob
justifiably indifferent
to my rapidly decomposing
accomplishments,
my feelings, and my thoughts—
which I only borrowed anyways.
Frees me up to disregard
a future I won’t own
and the past that never
knew me, to light
my one square foot
of the present on fire
and let Him blow me wherever.
I get on my knees. I should stay
on my knees and gnaw
at the pride in my heart.
I wanted to let go of Clark’s poem. I could have loved it ending with I get on my knees. But I didn’t like the drawn-out ending with its cynical resignation and reversal of sense, the shift from My heart is not proud at the beginning of the poem to the wholly contradictory state of having pride enough left to get down on one’s knees and keep gnawing on it. Which makes enough sense in that no humility can ever be enough, just as no vanity can ever. Critics cry contradiction, religion with its allowance of mystery admits paradox. Poetry operates more freely in its wide range from solemnity and praise to irony, scrutiny and even desecration.
The title of the poem with its evocation of a religious text directs me to the comparison between the two distinct bodies of inspiration, religion and poetry… Religion’s primary purpose is to edify and make faith durable, and so it allows itself little if any confusion about its expression. That does lay the discipline open to hypocrisy—one of poetry’s most coveted preys.
The rascals of poetry have for long profited from the stricter demands on religion. When the lights of worldliness stray—and when have they failed to?—from our understanding of the better way, be it from God or just from a long tradition of precedents that have helped our better minds know right from wrong, religion marks its quiet difference and holds to the truth and grace it knows, while poetry opens the door to the rags and bones of the day, to mimicry and mockery and also, perhaps even more perilous or sorrowful, to intellectual resignation. But where the buck stops.
Underlying sarcasm is no short supply in Clark’s poem, especially in the heart of it where he speaks of the allowances granted by his dearest democratic right: He is free. Free to ignore what the president’s up to, and to forget the celebrities and their vanity so in the public’s eye, and to neglect the mob who’s indifferent to his poetry. (Clark rightfully airs, as a poet with a mission to bring value and meaning and weight to the prompts of language and thought, his frustration—even resignation about our culture’s celebrities who command so much attention and authority and so dictate vacuous materialism to the happening core of our society, the once dangerous but now for the most part deer-in-the-headlights youth culture and young professionals—Strong men and beautiful women…)
Reading the poem, moreover, I’m reminded it’s nothing less than our most powerful instinct at play when we talk about our pride. Our first nature’s command is: Be Prideful! Survive, above all, and on that impulse—climb, climb, be at the top of the heap if at all possible. Even in the event of an air disaster, we’re reminded to secure our own oxygen masks before helping others.
Only our capacity for imagination and delusion equals our vanity (under nature’s command to live, to be). That is why humility is so hard to come by, and why, all in all, acceptance is indispensable to our sanity and best thinking—in clarity, for most of us, about our own just averageness. Lucidity of his common belonging is what made the character Tom Joad and his author John Steinbeck so memorable to us. Dickens and Twain empower us with Romantic imagination, to elevate the plainest among us, or often the oppressed, to spellbinding compassion, onto social reversals and triumph and self-esteem (often with a lot of humor). Yet
the mind full of unpurchased entitlement, holiness, nobility and splendor coming to terms with the clay, ashes and dust (generic cereal and driving a Toyota Camry), this catches our attention (admiration) in the other direction, reminding us that our true ideals lie in the middle ground. Much as we need to inflate ourselves with inspiration, we need to weigh ourselves soberly with common sense and what is actually possible. This is what classicists mean when they say they go both ways.
Finally, though something in me squirms as Clark’s irony devolves into sarcasm, I catch glimpses of how the uncomfortable progression is in fact an adequate reflection of what people are really feeling these days, with the economy breaking away from its chains. Our growing unease about being able to make ends meet. And that stemming in large part from the nation’s commitment in a war few of us think we should be in. Too many innocent lives are being cast to destitution. Few of us have the space or wherewithal to articulate the gravity we’re acquiescing to. But we feel it. The poet citing the psalm won’t let the complex, elusive hypocrisy res
