God Came Tonight
God came tonight, to a dark warehouse,
inhabited by squeaking mice and lonely chatter.
He came with the grand headline:
“I have banned fear and uncertainty.
Now you can truly celebrate
your loneliness and your aloneness.”
Listen, as God passes triumphantly across
the lost pages and unread editorials.
Night scatters restless heartbeats.
In a leafy column, a calm column,
he gathers scattered letters
and joins them into an essay on peace.
The night struggles:
“Why am I so lonely?
Why can I only find peace
in noisy voices and loud quarrels?”
“Perhaps you are too attached
to definitions whose meanings never last.”
This was the answer he sought.
Truly, he was blessed that night
in the pouring rain, as he struggled
to be free of uncertainty and doubt.
He pushed the straggling hair
back from his broad forehead.
He brushed his curling moustache
and the sideburns growing around his misery.
Outside, the wind and the rain chased each other,
forming a long convoy of gloom.
Then he took his pen, sharpened it
on his wound, and wrote:
What am I, God?
I am the footprints of a wanderer
across a series of commentaries in a newspaper;
the lingering aroma of old brassieres
the smell of semen after making love.
I am only a heap of worries, God.
I am only a hundred hectares of newsprint
after a bushfire; a discarded poem
besieged by five battalions of advertising.
And God came tonight
to a dark warehouse, underground,
inhabited by squeaking mice
and lonely chatter.
He came with four thousand troops
armed with handcuffs and rifles.
Can you hear them, banging on the door
and shouting:
“Don’t try to stop us.
Don’t try to run away and hide.
We are lonely too.
We just want to be with you
in a leafy column, a calm column.
Let us gather our weapons
and shape them into an article on fear.
Then, if we may, we’ll confiscate all that you own,
and take it away, even if it is no more
than worthless trash
and empty pages.”
Take their fear, Oh God,
And lead them into the land of good news.