After against among, around. How I admire prepositions, small as they are, like safety pins, their lives given to connecting. They are the paid help, maids in black uniforms who pass hors d’oeuvres, and they’re the forbidden joy that leaps between us when we get to know them. Without connection what can survive? Because the lawn waits for sun to wake it from its winter nap, we say sunlight lies on the grass. Even the simplest jar connects—jar under moonlight, on counter, jar in water. It was prepositions in the Valley of Dry Bones that stitched the femur to the heel, heel to the foot bone. And afterwards, they got up to dance. Between, beside, within may yet keep the precarious chins and breasts from tumbling off Picasso’s women. I would make prepositions the stars of grammar like the star that traveled the navy sky the night sweet Jesus lay in his cradle, pulling those kings toward Bethlehem, and us behind them, trekking from the rim of history toward Him.
—Jeanne Murray Walker is professor of English at the University of Delaware. A poet and playwright, she is the author most recently of A Deed to the Light (Univ. of Illinois Press). This poem was first published in The Christian Century.
Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
