My God is God/Your God is the Devil
I grew up in a Catholic family. Went to Catholic schools. Even thought about being a priest at one time.
I've always thought about God and how I see Him and how other people -- people who had a totally different world views -- see him.
This sense of the difference between how others see my god and how I view their gods has intensified in the last dozen or so years, especially after 9/11.
I wrote a poem about it, and I've been thinking about it recently.
Here's the poem -- really two poems.
GODS
1. My God is God
My God lives in heaven and He lives here
In my heart and the hearts of those around me.
His thoughts are pure and true and gentle,
and his truest wish is to dream of babies
playing in water soft as white roses.
When His lips come together in a smile
The heavens smile too and the rains say
“Goodbye, goodbye, the sun is coming”
And when He smiles men are never hungry
and their wives have eyes as soft as roses too.
And where my God is, there are no strangers,
only brothers who will take our hands
And kiss our cheeks for luck along the road,
No matter how hard it is, no matter how long.
2. Your God is the Devil
He wears a broken hat and dead men’s clothes
and he comes from a place where men are hungry
and children die in the dirt waiting for dawn.
Nothing your stupid god wishes for comes true:
If he prays for peace he gets cyclones,
twisters that shred his skin like razors
and rain sorrow on all who pray to him.
If he wishes for love among brothers
he gets brothers who spit at each other,
fathers who beat their sons on their weddings days,
daughters who flaunt their evil shoes and dresses
before their mothers and holy grandmothers.
Your god is a straw thing who fears my boot
And what I can do to him with my hands.
No comments:
Post a Comment