Satan’s apology to the daughters of Job

I tormented your father Job.

I was jealous of his trust

that the ways of that God

of Abraham and Jacob

though unexplained are always just.

Your father doubted yet never once cursed God

and came to consider his fortunes restored –

just in ways different to what had gone before.

I was banished from the company of heaven

to wander like a goat through the deserts of Canaan

and then this way and that way upon the face of the whole earth.

I have been beside each one of you three daughters of Job –

sometimes a lizard on the ceiling of your laboratory,

sometimes a snake in your pages of research.

I have tempted you to find the causes of suffering

though they are multiple, unyielding.

Some speak of a Behemoth in the Persian marshes,

imagine a Leviathan in the Syrian sea, but you,

you watch how the wind withdraws and advances,

how the severed tree sprouts new branches.

You have dissected the scorpion that poisons the dart,

you have even opened your own hearts.

And you’ve analysed your enemies,

like the Chaldean armies

who would burn your markets,

tear down your temples,

pillage your vineyards and palaces.

You have studied well, daughters of Job,

this is your beauty and it’s given me faith.

Look up with me at Orion and Pleiades,

notice that even death has observable places,

stitches on the ruffled blanket of time.

Tomorrow our children could be refugees

washed up on a foreign coast of Edom

but we must believe in the possibility of welcome,

that as hands push through sand, as eyelids open,

sunlight will pattern the calmness of the ocean

as it did in those moments we may never understand

when the majesty of all this life first began!

Now, like your father Job, I do not curse God

for I know that the universe, elaborate and complex,

is not ruled by his whim but by cause and effect

and yet, even through the closing eyelids of dusk,

there is nowhere so dark that God’s love cannot find us.

2016