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Irene Zimmerman
How Judith Saved Her People
When the Elders of Bethulia said, on the assembly floor:
“We’ll surrender to the Assyrians in five days more
unless the Lord God saves us,” the widow Judith prayed
in her rooftop hermitage where she had mostly stayed
for three mourning years, ever since her husband died.
Resolutely now, she laid her widow’s weeds aside.
“Holy God,” she pleaded, “grant me courage and power
to save your people Israel from this dreadful hour.”
That night she donned her jewels, called her maid and went
to the enemy encampment, where soldiers led them to the tent
of Holofernes. Her beauty smote the General right between the eyes.
“No woman in the world,” he thought, “is more beautiful and wise.”
“God sent me,” said Judith, “to achieve great things with you.”
(Little did he understand just how her words were true.)
For three days and nights the women wandered in and out.
By day four, Holofernes was in a mighty pout.
He exclaimed to his eunuch, “This is a disgrace.
If I don’t seduce her, she will scorn me to my face!”
At that evening’s banquet, Judith wound alluring wiles
around her salivating host as he feasted on her smiles
and called loudly for wine, and more of it, and more.
He drank more wine that night than he had ever drunk before.
When at last, besot and befuddled, he led her to his tent,
his sleepy servants took one look and discreetly went.
Daintily, she dawdled with ties and countless bows
while he waited lasciviously for her to shed her clothes.
But sleep at last conquered him and he began to snore.
This was, of course, exactly what she had been praying for.
At once she grabbed the General’s sword which hung above the bed
and cut off, with two mighty strokes, Holofernes’ head.
The sleepy, unsuspecting guards didn’t think to raise an alarm
when Judith and her handmaid walked with beauty and charm
through the gates of the Assyrian camp, their gory treasure rolled
in Holofernes’ canopy of purple fringed with gold.
Selling Joseph
(Genesis 37)
Elder brother Judah grabs a rope of compromise
and dangles it before his brothers’ Joseph-jealous eyes:
why not make a profit from this murderous enterprise
and sell our bragging brother into slavery?
They agree.
A caravan stands ready—the camels on the road.
Young Joseph is delivered from a twisted brotherhood
and his many-colored coat returned to Jacob, soaked in blood.
Resurrection
My mother died eight years ago today.
Late this afternoon I picked my way
through a new-plowed field to a path in a greening woods
where flowers had pushed through winter leaves and stones
to tell a parable of life and death.
I heard the earth beneath me hold its breath
and felt my mother’s rhythms in my bones—
a symphony of pathed and unpathed woods,
of Beethoven and books: strange, lovely blend
of careful and uncultivated ways—
and realized her life will never end.
The dead have powers
to roll away the stones of earth and hours,
to burst through bonds of unplowed space and time,
and sign their presence with perennial flowers.
Irene Zimmerman has been a Franciscan Sister for more than fifty years. The author of the collection Incarnation, her poems have been published in such periodicals as Cross Currents, The Christian Century, The National Catholic Reporter, and St. Anthony Messenger. She lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Copyright © 2006 by Irene Zimmerman. All Rights Reserved.
This page published in April 2006.
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