A Crisis of Faith

Letter to God

At sixteen, beneath the pallor of a wet autumn day,
In an atrium draped in silence (in calm),
More than a century after the first report,
I read of your death.
We had not spoken in some time.
Now, upon reflection, our conversations
Feel as distant as the youth
I spent meandering down river banks,
With an invisible Huck Finn,
Collecting colourful stones
That would lose their vibrancy
After drying by the woodstove.
I once, in blind adolescence,
While cataloguing chaos
Into a red (then water-stained orange) notebook,
Heaved all blame upon your shoulders,
Ignorantly placing liability
On the conscience of a ghost.
Now, I still see others reach for you
And they incite more to do the same.
Their efforts, albeit aggressive,
Breed only futilities:
In fact, this letter itself
Seems an empty exercise
In dramatic narrative;
Though, still, I write:
Fearful of the incessant notion
That my beauty, my art
Have always been linked
To the persistence of your venom
And now, in the end, there is no word,
Only Poets ravaging the rotted bark
Of a felled redwood.