When Death Was Free to Roam The World

In our mundane, materialistic, skeptical society we may be suffering from the illusion that there is nothing more to life and the universe than what our senses can perceive.

When Death was free to roam the world,
unconstrained by science and medicine,
when doctors were mostly showmen
and priests held the final word, t'was
then people believed in God as well
as heaven's bliss and hell's torments.

We moderns think that quaint now
as we look back, so much wiser:
battling microbe killers while our
instruments poke the universe as
our knowledge gallops ever faster.
Now we think death is the end,
there will be no more after the
last breath, the final breath is
uttered-- and angels are found
only in those obsolete shelters
housing illusions of a dead deity.

'Be thee so sure?' an ancient prophet
might ask, for if you are wrong in
the measuring, in the weighing of
this world, then what world might
await you as body and brain expire
and you find something still exists,
an imperishable mind, one far beyond
our mortal understanding clipped
by our senses and our feeble fears.


(c. 2016)

Reviews

[Geodan]

I like it! It shows the changes and hardships that our world has overcome, but also the new things we face. It bends the mind and confuses the heart. In my opinion, the best poems aren't straight forward.

[Nolo Segundo]

Thank you, Geodan, and I very much appreciate the thoughtfulness of your review: 'bends the mind..' is exactly my goal; for secular thought today sees humans as little more than perishable animals. I learned the hard way--- a very hard way--almost a 1/2 century ago that we are both mortal and immortal beings. And it's complicated my life far more than my youthful agnosticism ever did.

[Rick Puetter]

Dear Nolo,

An interesting write, but I find your appeal, perhaps a call back to belief, in the final stanza unconvincing. I have heard this argument before, i.e., what if you choose not to believe but are wrong and there is a God and afterlife. Well if the loving and all-knowing God of so many religions can't look into the honesty of my heart and cannot see that it was not for a lack of goodness that I am an unbeliever, then I would begin to question the reasons to be a follower of such a God. If I am wrong and learn that I am wrong after my death, I will be the first to say, "Well I had that wrong. Thank you for opening my eyes and revealing the truth." But if that's not good enough, well, I will lose a little respect since I am always willing to graciously accepting apologies from people who finally see that they were on the wrong side of the argument and see that I was right. I just say, "No problem. Don't worry about it. I don't think any the lesser of you."

Regarding the writ itself, I enjoyed it. It raises important questions and I think it does correctly paint the changes that have happened in the world regarding belief in God, etc. Who knows what the truth is? We can only speculate and try to give things our best shot.

All my best regards,

Rick

[Nolo Segundo]

I wasn't really thinking of Pascal's wager when I wrote it, Rick. I don't believe in God for God's sake, but for my own--because I am broken, and I believe everyone is broken in one way or another. Saying this does not mean that an atheist cannot be well adjusted, or that every believer has his act together. With humans nothing is simple, nothing is easy-- I suspect God may be the same, only more so; but I, like untold others, have experienced things that cannot be explained by this world.

You did allude a bit to what I was trying to suggest: what happens to the individual, and people in general when society at large has lost any sense of something beyond themselves, an existence beyond their mortality, be it God or their own endless consciousness, their immortal soul? Will humankind find its solace, its reason for being, in the internet, TV, the shopping mall as it has in church, mosque and temple? Perhaps people will adjust well to the notion that human sentience is just a lit candle that may burn brightly for a short while only to be extinguished forever-- and end once and for all time crime, addiction, depression, war and a pervasive malaise that daily sweeps through untold millions. Perhaps....

[Rick Puetter]

Interesting, Nolo. Thanks for the clarification. But I did sense a bit of Pascal's wage in this. Perhaps I was wrong. Anyway, what you focus on in your comment is indeed the most important, and it is what I primarily got from your write. Thanks for making things crystal clear. My very best regards, Rick.

[Indra Neil]

a profound write with great depth! very well composed!