When an Atheist Invents a New God
In the formless flux of raw experience,
this god will stand firmly in the maelstrom,
cherishing and celebrating our fragile,
transient, damaged world.
She will not ask for faith or demand fear.
There will be no kneeling, no days of fasting or worship.
She will not hang commandments on every wall,
nor red A’s around the necks of loving women.
There will be no need to bring her a goat or a handful of dollars
because she will not believe in sacrifices
or mortal sin. She will say out loud that
confession boxes are punishing, sooty relics
that should be turned on their sides
and planted with the first flowers of spring.
She will not tell us what to eat or when to eat it.
She would never require women
to disappear in the lonesome grotto of the burka
nor be obedient to abusive husbands,
nor bear, for the spread of the gospel, child after child after child.
She will threaten no judgment day to make us fear death and need her.
She will not ask for group-think that becomes political identity.
She will not cleave our world into
the good and the evil, the chosen and the others.
There will be no words in her philosophy that require
the slaughter of non-believers. She will be ferociously non-violent,
and, best of all, she won’t give a damn if we believe in her or not.
She will accept that we humans
shift daily, flicker momentarily,
are always ambiguous. She will teach
we can live light-heartedly without
pledges of identity to a power-hungry
entity that offers us implausible heaven
somewhere in a dark, cold sky.
She will offer a model of passion for ordinary life
in all its glory, muck and worry.
Her parables will tell us cosmic punishment
and cosmic forgiveness are malicious old whispers.
She will declare there are no angels or devils.
This new god will rollick and whoop.
She will bathe in the sun. She will pirouette in the rain
and invite us to do the same.
She will encourage our love and our art.
She will like us. She will trust our goodness.
.
Take My Dead, Please
The dead should just shut up.
Ellen Bryant Voight
The dead should just shut up
starting this spring.
They should stop arriving
at the border.
They are terminated, complete,
mute, right?
They are books whose
last pages have been turned,
no rereads permitted.
They follow me
to the bathroom
and ask why I’m still living.
I will kick their shadows
on down the road
where silence owns the void.
They had their chance.
The dead make too many calls,
especially in dreams
where they insist they are themselves
but have empty, foreign faces.
They are noisy. They smoke
and dress in weird clothes
of avocado green and
wear sideburns and mustaches
that look like feathered fans.
They meet each other in the moonlight
to pass judgment on us, the living,
who forgot their birthday,
told them the truth,
told them a lie,
didn’t see what they needed.
The air stiffens, runs cold
every time one of their
scraggly selves sits next to me,
taps my shoulder and
starts blabbing away.
Shut up, I say. Just shut up.
I will put on my socks
and go for a walk in
spring air that whiffs today
of honeysuckle and lilac.
I will not hear them.
.
Dreaming is Psyche telling stories
Psyche sits on an ottoman, a tapestried ottoman,
eating donuts from a greasy bag.
She adjusts her butterfly wings
before plunging her red nails deep into sugar.
She finishes her treat and licks her fingers while
complaining that Focusing is hard, especially in the dark.
Dreaming is Psyche telling stories, and
I’ve lobbied to be her editor in my own dreams.
I am the kindly former English teacher with
big glasses, a cat, and a thick red pen;
I have credentials.
I will remind her that
dreams of old loves are filled
with witless (Romantic) embarrassment,
and that they should, therefore, be omitted
from any concoction of hers.
I’ve suggested more than once that she
acknowledge my age and
animate stories that prove me feminist and wise,
chaste, mature and reasonable.
But she continues to fabricate ones where
I wander around in old houses that belong to someone else
looking for old lovers, kissing them by the back door.
© Brenda Stevens Baer
Brenda Stevens Baer is a retired writing teacher with an abiding love of poetry, where she finds, like Marianne Moore, a place for the genuine and a place to stand in awe of the mysteries that surround us. Her poems have been published in various literary magazines. She has been facilitating a poetry group through the Towson Osher Program for five years.
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