Toss Away

Toss Away

(“But alas for you Pharisees, because you tithe the mind and the rue and every vegetable, while disregarding the justice and the love of God. These things you should practice without omitting the other.” Luke 11:42)

I’m not ashamed to say I’ve watched you change the way
you use your intelligence to ferret out the truth. Predilections aside,
it’s the predictions that make me wonder why no one takes you to task.

Like a sci-fi novel gone bad, we’ve suspended our disbelief so far
there is no resemblance at all, your world to this one, no mirror to the moon,
no twin for the sun. Only baloney that tastes like rhetoric and
and dust devils that look like a daydreamer’s wish of the opponent’s
final demolition.

But there is an elixir sweet, that distills every law and prophet down
to palpable drink for the ready; a panacea of pain for the smug.

There might be a chill in the wind next summer, I’ll grant that
stones might roll across the sand;
But on the other hand, the sun may smile as it did summer last,
and the conspiracies we hear, the ones only the whisperers
conceive, may fail to appear. Unborn, they die the death which
no one trumpets who predicted them last year.

There is a recipe ready for the masses, pleasant consent to order:
a seasoning that hits the palate and awakes lingering hope for
something more comfortable than institutional fare. The recipe may
look the same
as our memories of home, but
the taste, the suggestion that the food is less about perfection
than relishing the hands like mothers who made it

Helps us toss away our apocalypse prophecy to
enjoy the spread meant to feed the world hungry
for more

Than another conspiracy that makes God out to be
a spice-counting pinchpenny.