I have lost my easy God -
the one whose name I knew since childhood.
I knew his temper, his sullen outrage, his ritual forgiveness.
I knew the strength of his arm, the sound of his insistent voice.
His beard bristling, his lips full and red with
moisture at the moustache,
His eyes clear and piercing, too blue to understand all,
His face too unwrinkled to feel my child's pain.
He was a good God - so he told me - a long
suffering and manageable one.
I knelt at his feet and kissed them,
I felt the smooth countenance of his forgiveness.
I never told him how he frightened me,
How he followed me as a child
When I played with friends or begged for candy on Halloween.
He was a predictable God, I was the unpredictable one.
He was unchanging, omnipotent, all-seeing,
I was volatile and helpless.
He taught me to thank him for the concern which gave me no chance to breathe,
For the love which demanded only love in return - and obedience.
He made pain sensible and patience possible and the future foreseeable.
He, the mysterious, took all mystery away,
corroded my imagination,
Controlled the stars and would not let them speak for themselves.
Now he haunts me seldom: some fierce umbilical is broken,
I live with my own fragile hopes and sudden rising despair.
Now I do not weep for my sins; I have learned to love them
And to know that they are the wounds that make love real.
His face illudes me; his voice, with all itspity,
does not ring in my ear.
His maxims memorized in boyhood do not make fruitless and pointless my experience.
I walk alone, but not so terrified as when he held my hand.
Now my easy God is gone - he knew too much to be real,
He talked too much to listen, he knew my words before I spoke.
But I knew his answers as well
computerized and turned to dogma His stamp was on my soul,
his law locked cross-like on my heart,
His imperatives tattooed on my breast, his
aloofness canonized in ritual.
Now he is gone - my easy, stuffy God
God, the father-master, the mother-whiner, the
Dull, whoring God who offered love bought by an infant's fear.
Now the world is mine with all its pain and warmth, with its every color and sound;
The setting sun is my priest with the ocean
for its altar.
The rising sun redeems me with the rolling waves warmed in its arms.
A dog barks and I weep to be alive, a cat studies me and my joy is boundless.
I lie on the grass and boy-like, search the sky.
The clouds do not turn to angels, the winds do not whisper of heaven or hell.
Perhaps I have no God - what does it matter? I have beauty and joy and transcending loneliness,
I have the beginning of love - as beautiful as it is feeble - as free as it is human.
I have the mountains that whisper secrets held before men could speak,
I have the ocean that belches life on the beach and caresses it in the sand, I have a friend who smiles when he sees me,
who weeps when he hears my pain,
I have a future full of surprises, a present full of wonder.
I have no past - the steps have disappeared
the wind has blown them away.
I stand in the Heavens and on earth, I feel the breeze in my hair.
I can drink to the North Star and shout on a bar stool,
I can feel the teeth of a hangover, the joy of laziness,
The flush of my own rudeness, the surge of my own ineptitude.
And I can know my own gentleness as well, my wonder, my nobility.
I sense the call of creation, I feel its swelling in my hands.
I can lust and love, eat and drink, sleep and rise,
But my easy God is gone - and in his stead
The mystery of loneliness and love!
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