Your God Is Indeed A Great Magician

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Your God Is Indeed A Great Magician

Ah, this rolling blue globe--so nobly fashioned, so grandly displayed!

Waters, sweet waters, from mountains cascade

over flowers that tower over beetle and blade,

over horrors that harrow, like earth meeting spade,

like wrapped ranks of newborns, aligned and arrayed

like bluing cadavers--

in Whose image made!

Consider:

These are factors, my friend!

Though we dodge and dissemble, though we bend or transcend,

we grind out our lives to the black bitter end.

O Lord, why must Thy children rummage,

famish, and perish in Thy plenitude?

Why must good men stream stalwart to gray?

Are we mortals too base for Thy great giving Hand?

Too brief for Thy tending? Too crude for Thy clay?

How then may we please Thee?

Thou art truly the Great Prestidigitator.

Comers! Embrace Him!

Brethren, submit to His limitless light.

Skeptics, be awed. Behold ye His sleight:

blood out of bedlam, plague out of mist,

babies in bondage released by His Fist.

O Master of magic! O mighty MC!

Veteran Showman, delighted are we!

Pox or pandemic, we roundly approve--

sing Thee? We rave Thee! We relish each move:

the breathtaking breadth of Thy legerdemain

bewitches the senses, bedevils the brain.

Contemplate:

Grim maids awaiting their loves gone to war--

a snap of Thy Fingers: these maids wait no more!

Souls confiscated, gambits withdrawn:

Wolf takes bambino (Magician takes pawn).

Too fleet for we fledglings, all captures are Thine.

What thing of mere flesh could divine the Divine?

This God is a dazzler. Such prowess hath He.

Deluges, tsunamis, whipped straight from the sea!

Blameless lives broken, whole peoples bled,

raped, burned, and buried--and still we near-dead

beg His attendance from one common knee.

Yea, blessed are we! Be we sick or insane,

be we rife with contagion, be we lovelorn or lame.

But tease us no longer…reveal Thyself!

Benign Benefactor--

just…

effing…

SHOW!

Accept our acclaim!

How can we thank Thee, repay Thee, how may we proclaim

Thine Image as Perfect, as Perfect Thy Name.

Celebrate:

Great Herder, Grand Handler--how, Wizard, might we,

with raw voice revere Thee, with mangled soles pace

those stars whence Thou ventured, that slime whence we came.

O Hero, O Healer--forgive us our shame!

We sully Thee sorely. We profane Thy grace.

Thrill us. Kill us. Fill us with ludicrous logic and lore.

Bruise us. Abuse us. Wow us with Wisdom.

Amuse us some more.

O Father Who made us, Who taught us to heel,

we thank Thee for roaches, for each rash and wheal,

for hormones like lashes that drive us to sin…

the Big Dark approaches…what price to get in?

For all this, Director, we flatline on cue,

Seizing in time to that magic You do.

Cogitate:

Though screaming off-key, beholden are we

for fever and frenzy, for death and debris,

for cancers, psychoses, senescence and boils,

for madmen encroaching from alien soils.

Yea! Humbled by Thee--nay, staggered are we!

By He who looms invisible, inaccessible, unthinkable,

immeasurable, improbable…jeez…incomprehensible…

insensible…insupportable--acknowledge, sheep!

Think, damn you--not even once witnessed!

Not once ever seen! Tangible spirit? Kindly physics?

So how, zealots? How, masses? Sweet reason--

how, indeed? A Maker opaque to both mind and machine?

Too fickle to fathom, too abstract to read?

Yet He is Poet, He is Artist, He is King above kings!

For this we adore Him o’er all other things--

o’er forests and canyons, o’er rivers and glens…

for all these momentous, magnanimous,

multitudinous, miraculous…such depth and detail!

We piddly souls pale, blaze briefly and fail,

like bugs on a slide ’neath His ominous lens.

Cerebrate:

These are factors, my friend!

Whether Almighty antics or blind nature’s trend,

we grind out our lives to the black bitter end.