Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, Oil On Canvas, Cristoforo Roncalli (Early 1620s)

By Janiru Liyanage ‘27

I thought I could not do it. This life, heavy as a body,

this body, heavy as a life. Over the phone, I tell my

grandmother’s brother, I love him, I miss him.

We bless each other and hang up. He is also a poet,

and he is dying. In a few weeks, he will die, and no one will tell me for

a month. At his funeral, everyone will say how happy he is now,

forever, free from his ravaged body, paralyzed from the waist down,

barely bathed. For years, I believed in goodness, the way a river believes

in the shore, or the way grief believes in a body. Even this

must amount to something, Lord. Prophet after prophet,

I waited to hear Your faultless Voice.

Instead, they starved themselves in caves, spun faux

miracles with gunpowder and betel nut, called only for honey, locusts

and slaughter. They told me the price of having a body is hunger.

How could I have known? The last time we spoke, he read me

all the poems he learnt as a boy—Wordsworth, Dickens, Whitman—

pointing to his head, a snow-capped field of rye, he said: Though I can’t move

my body, I write everything down. Write it down. What else to do with this image?

Days, I dragged my body across acres of rye, my kingdom saddled behind

and little else. I thought I couldn’t go on. Ashamed of my faith, I crawled

all the way to Gethsemane, prepared to lie down for good. Then, The Man.

Then, the struggle—windblown limb on limb, stinging muscle and hot pink flash of sinew.

How could I have won? Limping with my lamb leg dangling from its socket like a tongue.

But there, on the horizon, dawn light, rising. Look: its arrows of light, spreading sudden

and blinding like grief or faith. What to do with this image? What else, when you have

seen The Face of God and lived? You write it. You write it down. And live.

Contributed by Janiru Liyanage. Janiru is a junior at Harvard College studying Neuroscience.