Let There Be Light

First draft of a poem about my relationship with God/religion growing up.

 

1. God is dead

 

Three hundred children fidgeting

Amass within the hall,

Then Mrs. Tudor takes the stage

And silences us all.

 

“Today, St. John’s, please welcome Grace,

A speaker from the Church.

She’s here to guide your souls to God

As you begin your search.”

 

Though young, her garb of sexless beige

Dilutes her in a blur,

Like hotel art she seems designed

As sorbet’s furniture.

 

“Dear children, do not let us love

With words or in our speech,

Let truth and action be the voice

Of what we wish to teach.

 

“The heavens all declare God’s love,

His testament’s the sky.

His fondest work is righteous men

And nature, neither lie.”

 

I see the preacher’s eyes stay fake,

Mouth grinning tooth to tooth,

And judge her as sincere a friend

As champion of truth.

 

Was I at five years old unique

To see the lie she sold,

Who claimed to know a mystery,

Breath steaming in the cold?

 

Like fungus grown on wisdom’s corpse,

The Church of England prays

With words long fossilized to youth,

All blind to what relays.

 

 

2. Hedonism

 

I traded hymns for orchestras

Whose signatures in blood

Would damn them for eternity

To hell once in the mud.

 

Satan invested them with art,

Dark beautiful and strange

Whose sanguine humming put to shame

A church immune to change.

 

As though my soul had been upon

A shelf, they shook the dust

And blew it from the pages

That neglect had left to rust.

 

My tribe would dance in booming rooms

Filled by their drum and string

While magic spells pulsed in our veins

To glory everything.

 

If God is love, I knew Him here

And found Him in the throng

That shared a mind and body,

Less a flock and more a song.

 

My outraged mother banished me

When one too many times

She caught me with the music

And the magic and my crimes.

 

I grieved for the automaton,

A sleepwalker and slave

And left the bosom of the chaste

To live amongst the brave.

 

Echo and Ocean, Harmony,

Saffron, Serenity.

Smoke coils from the witch’s stick

The circle smokes with glee.

 

My friends have hair like lions’ manes

And clothes like Aztec kings,

As magpies they adorn themselves

With fascinating things.

 

Things come and go, we do not fret

How best to hoard or earn.

We scavenge like an orchard thief

And spend with no concern.

 

Where did we come from? No-one knows;

Whereafter do we flow?

Fools think us apes could ever tell,

Who answers does not know.

 

3. Spirituality

 

One day I swallowed something strange

And made a grand new friend-

A wizened tree with leaves of bronze,

I bowed to see him bend.

 

The sky, his kin, urged with a gale

Us dance and listen sharp.

Winds made of whispered secrets played

My eardrums like a harp.

 

‘So strange, so strange,’ I’m murmering

I find, and lying down.

‘That I am anything at all,

Why does all this surround

 

A puppeteered and mad machine

That masquerades as me?

All miss that nothingness makes sense,

Not this absurdity.’

 

I spy a frog who whips his tongue

And swallows up a fly.

He ribbits proud and hops along,

More satisfied than I.

 

Man’s food is truth, who has the tongue

To catch what’s senseless, made

Of wind, and mocks alike the wise

And young, steadfast and strayed?

 

I knew then that whatever was

Is how it’s meant to be;

I’m dreaming evermore because

The mundane turned to mystery.