Amber Krogel | Lot’s Wife Looks and Looks | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

July 31, 2024

Amber Krogel

Lot’s Wife Looks and Looks

You may feel sorry for me but let me tell you, until you’ve looked like one, you can’t know what a mountain sees. There are things that stay hidden and must be worshipped, then there is everything else that reveals itself to those who look long enough and must also be worshipped. It’s like this: don’t blink and notice how the film of water that forms over your eyes begins to magnify colour. Notice how no one asked if I wanted to stay, and if you had I would have said people go blind in caves. If you had asked me who I belong to I would have said the Lily of the Valley which you can tell by the way it praises the ground is by far more trumpet than tears and which I am now free to look at all day long. If you say everything about me is a sin I say bring me a mirror and let me look at myself in an empty room until I learn something new about the nature of sin. If you say brimstone I say look at how the fire’s blaze can soften into a halo. If you say exile I say look at how what you love can disappear in any direction and come back as an open horizon. If you say it’s not too late I say please, you are blocking my view.

This poem is based on the biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19. I grew up with sermons that preached Lot’s wife as a cautionary tale — assuming that if she could speak she would speak of regret, just like the flowers trailing out of the Garden of Eden were proof Eve was sorry. Revisiting this story now, I see in Lot’s wife’s missing perspective the instructive questions I encountered in my own exodus from Evangelicalism: Who is served by the command to not look? What if it is not casting off but attending to the world in its fullness that saves us? What if holiness abounds?