Something To Do With Life
 
The living take up residence – claim jumpers really,
inhabiting played out mine shafts,
sharecroppers occupying fields that should fallow for a year.
The temporary is where fear and desire live.
They give dust filled lungs, hands full of dirt, our minds on fire
with all that is temporal – the hard scrabble of life in lean years.
With love it becomes conception, birth, resurrection.
We search our memories for anything to forestall closure,
hoping to find something gilt-edged,
say the final scene of La Boheme,
the bittersweet beauty of death as art.
 
 
Something To Do With Faith
 
What is it the faithful know? What do the faithless believe?
What is the expectation of suffering less, or suffering at all?
They are the curtain waiting to come down.
They are the finale, pregnant with doubt,
anticipation longing for understanding.
The word death carries its own weight.
The word life is borne in the hands like a chalice of wine.
The word hope is our faith.
The fire is on our tongues.
Our heads are anointed with the ash of generations,
And we are the instruments of our salvation.
 
 
Something To Do With God
 
The existence of God explains everything
Except the existence of God, for that you need humans.
God is either a physicist or a junk dealer,
Or maybe a gambler shooting craps with loaded dice.
God must exist, who else would we blame for our folly?
Good and Evil don’t require God –
there’s enough of each in your average human to fuel the universe.
Silence on God’s part is mean spirited.
Silence on our part is surrender.
On second thought I’m not sure God’s mere existence explains anything,
Unless of course you believe what you read.
 
 
I am not sure why I felt compelled to write this poem. In fact I’m not certain it is a poem; but it is what came out when I sat down to write one “…so I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.”
 
The quotation is from Carl Spackler.