Giving God What For

Job's wife, addressing God:

All You can seem to do is lose Your temper
When reason-hungry mortals ask for reasons.
Of course, in the abstract high singular
There isn't any universal reason;
And no one but a man would think there was.
You don't catch women trying to be Plato.
Still there must be lots of unsystematic
Stray scraps of palliative reason
It wouldn't hurt You to vouchsafe the faithful.

-lines 135-143

Job, addressing God:

You have it in for women, she believes.
Kipling invokes you as Lord God of Hosts.
She'd like to know how You would take a prayer
That started off Lord God of Hostesses.

lines 178-181


Robert Frost

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