Jonah, as we know, did not want the job. He preferred boats to sermons, distance to destiny. We sympathize. Who hasn’t tried to outrun something invisible but insistent?
In MÉ IÓNA / I AM JONAH, Gabriel Rosenstock hands Jonah a haiku instead of a pulpit. It suits him. Three lines. A sigh. A half-swallowed prayer. The poems are written in Irish and English—two languages standing beside each other like two travelers in a station, each carrying a slightly different version of the same sorrow.
The Irish verses feel older, closer to the bone. The English ones lean into abstraction, like trying to describe fog to someone who’s never seen it. But both speak of exile, not just from place or purpose, but from self.
Jonah, swallowed by a whale, becomes something unexpected: not a warning, but a metaphor for what happens when we stop running and finally sit still. The belly of the beast becomes a thinking space. A remembering space. He recalls his mother. The world before language. Before command.
Nature here isn’t scenery—it’s the cast of characters. The wind accuses. The sea devours. The stars remain politely indifferent. Even silence has a role. It asks questions Jonah has no answers for, but sits with anyway.
And somehow, through these brief, delicate haiku, we don’t get a prophet—we get a person. Uncertain. Tired. Wondering. Which, come to think of it, may be the holiest state of all.
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You can read the entire book in the THF Digital Library. Please share your favorite poem from the book with us.Do you have a full or chapbook length book published in 2020 or earlier that you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details. Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archiveare selected by the THF Digital Librarian Dan Campbell and are used with permission.
Also, be sure to check out Rogha Gabriel’s Extracts from the works of Gabriel Rosenstock in Greek.
Essays, Art and Plays by Dan 
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