Monday, January 12, 2015

Believe It Or Not



Believe It Or Not

(With apologies to Job, the Psalmist, and Ecclesiastes)


I sat upon the bed
Of a shiny pickup truck
And watched the 
People passing by
Parading homo sapiens
Hoping they would
Live forever but knowing
They were 
Born to die.
And I called God to account
I asked why he or she was
Conspicuously
Inexplicably
Missing in our life's equation?
Why, as the world
Convulses with
Horrendous violence
Is he or she
Deafeningly silent?
You can't, I said,
Have Chosen Ones, the
Holocaust showed us that!
But do you care
For anyone?
What about the children
Beaten bloody
Raped and murdered
By your children in the bush?
Or in Middle Eastern 
Desert lands where 
It's said you gave
Birth to laws and goodness 
But that too was a lie
As the Caananite women
And their kids
Learned to their
Great sorrow.
Or other humans in
Those same lands - 
Iraq and Syria - who today
Hang on with fingernails
Chewed to the bone
In fear of horrors too
Explicit to describe 
In mere words.
So where are you now
If you weren't there before?
It is perhaps better to
Not believe than to be
Left with such a
Paradox of might 
And misery.
Unless, of course it's 
All a lie and has always
Been a lie
That you are nothing
More than a scrubby
Semite's dream.
But please stop laughing
It's not funny anymore
To the people tortured
Killed in your good name
Even in the USA - 
Where people pray
To you each day
And know that you
Want them to say
They trust in you
On signs and
On their money, too - 
Tortured people in the
Name of all that's
Good and right and...
Godly.
Righteousness defined
As water boarding
Because the swine
Did not deserve to
Live and we know that
You will forgive as
This is the land
You founded with 
Our founders who
Were good Christians
Just like you.
So why do you desert us
Why hide your face
In troubled times
We don't know what to do
You've given us too little
Information.
And so we must conclude
You don't exist you're
Just a ghastly fiction
An apparition we no 
Longer need for we
Know how it all began
And it wasn't in
The desert sand 
And there isn't one 
Thing you can do
To heal our broken
Hearts and lives 
And bring back all
Those we have lost
To those who said
They believed in you.


[Copyright © 2015 by Lowell A. Anderson.  All rights reserved.]


This poem was cross-posted to Creative Confections.