Wrestling Angels – a new poem by wolfiewolfgang about only half remembered events.

Jacob Wrestling With An Angel by Alexander Louis Leloir (1844-1884)

I have a new poem published tomorrow, Saturday 27th August, on the website http://www.everydaypoets.com

Every Day Poets is pretty well what it says on the label, it publishes a new poem every day of the year and then produces a hard copy anthology at the year end. You can subscribe, for free, and then receive a new short poem every day by email. It is a fantastic way of getting your poetry fix. You can access it by clicking on the link here on the right hand column of this page.

My poem is called Wrestling Angels, the second of mine to appear on this site,  and it tries to describe one of those disturbing experiences when too much alcohol and no little personal angst leads to a significant but only half-remembered incident that can change you mysteriously with a memory that lingers on. As with Jacob, in the Bible,  the wrestling match and the angel may only have been a dream. Who knows!

This is the Biblical reference (Genesis Chapter 32) if you are not familiar with this strange story about Jacob’s encounter with what was presumably an angel:

So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”
But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
The man asked him, “What is your name?”
“Jacob,” he answered.
Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.”

It is a matter of opinion what this is all about – the mystery is well caught, I think, in Gauguin’s painting Vision After The Sermon. My poem, shamefully, might record a somewhat less elevated moment or, maybe, not.
 
Vision After The Sermon by Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903)

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