It’s not that I don’t accept God, you must understand,
it’s the world created by Him I don’t and cannot accept.
– Ivan Karamazov from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Wisdom cries without;
She utters her voice in the street,
To the deaf and blind that walk aimlessly,
To a bottle cap rusting in a gutter.
The time has come
To place metal on the scale,
To give an accounting,
To add up the living and the dead.
What do you give, oh God,
That my eyes can behold?
How do you love, oh God,
If my loneliness abides?
Where do you live, oh God,
That I may enter in?
Is all I am all I have?
The bottle cap adrift,
Carried by strange waves
Through a sea of sadness,
Deposited on a rough shore,
Baptized in a spray of salty tears.
The tide recedes to leave
An expanse of hot sand
That cannot soothe my lonely heart.
I am sanctified, but I am cursed—
A rogue, a villain, and a thief.
What I give I do not want;
What I receive I cannot give away;
What I take is all I have.
You say there is hope for the lost,
And love abideth still.
And in this other world,
There is not the burden I carry,
This suffering child within.
Is this other world the reality,
Or are these only words,
Scribed by a sinner’s folly?
A charlatan, a madman, a magician,
Or the Son of God.
A prophet, a priest, or a king
Would set the captives free;
But a fool with dreamer’s eyes,
Has nothing but words to give.
From where do you come,
That this is not your home?
To where do you go,
That I may not follow?
Why torment me with false hope?
What more can the lost do?
Set me free and give me sight.
Give me the bread of life.
Put your soothing balms
On my rotting flesh and dead mind.
Pour your healing waters on my open wounds,
Or be gone—torment me no more!
Cease to offer what you cannot give.
Your shouting falls on deaf ears.
End the convulsions of my heart,
And the pain in my blind eyes.
Cut off my swollen tongue,
Parched from unanswered prayer,
And remove the callus from my soul.
Or return from whence you came,
To the quill in the priest’s hovel.
Even the tortured are not destitute;
They have their tormentor for company.
Is this what you leave for me?
Is this how you give not as the world gives,
A slap of pain on the palm of an outstretched hand?
Is this the last setting sun of my days?
Is this the beginning of my endless night?
The tormented and his tormentor,
The bereaved and his God,
Together at last.
I laugh as saliva dissolves the poison.
