Purgatory Explained

This is not the test

you intended to take.

The pop quiz of an open book

you hardly bothered to read.

Whatever you imagined

could wait, needed

no more than a morning's

cup of coffee to learn

is in fact the facts.

The carefully compiled list

of a life spent

avoiding culpability,

shifting blame from one foot

to some other's bulging back.

No matter, you have time

to make amends.

Indeed time is of no importance

here, take as much as you need.

When you've finished

you can begin again.

Ken e Bujold

Reviews

[Perry]

Ha! Great poem, Ken. So much for being shiftless, eh? Purgatory has a taste for the morally ambiguous--perhaps it's a good place for priests since sloth is their thesis, and a function of our own mediocrity. Some have even called it a deadly sin. In the Parable of the Madman, Nietzsche said, "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

[Ken e Bujold]

:) this comes from a simple place: I am always curious how men seek to square their indifference to the injustices all around them. It's a question I pose, even to the atheists, how much of a life have you lived, how do you justify it, if you have never really tried to live it to its fullest. By which I mean in all its glory, gore and s**t included?