[Newspoetry] so let's say you're a reverend...

[Donald L Emerick]

We used cummings as our love-offering poet
at a Methodist-officiated ceremony in St Louis
some 25 to 30 years ago... one that bleats
"i thank you god, for most this amazing day..."
affirmative poetry is nigh unto religion...

but, I also thought of using
some rambling Whitman piece,
Leaves of Grass, America sings
of people-mad into crowds,
as one pursuing for itself alone,
apart from persons present in it,
though they be indispensable for it,
mobbing weighs through all obstacles,
imperfect and erring, restlessly flowing on,
a thought I regret not having employed
since his god is nearer to my present god
than one which cumming's bespake--

but, gods are like cars and spare tires,
used mostly to run over and slay unholy enemies
except when some big wheel goes flat,
and a spare tire must be hauled out:
mob leadership may undergo regime change
which is often no change of regime at all,
but a change in the name of the same king--
an interchangeable world full of such parts
for some strange perpetuating motion machine:
king is dead, king is dead, so long lives king;

these appear only in emergencies of all kinds,
and often, now, are unfit for longer joy rides --
and like love that a wedding celebrates --
though often absent, quite unmissed,
as some actual embodied presence
who brings home peace and plenty,
as peace is some kind of learning
that more would never be enough:
where one never wants any more,
there is love and peace and plenty;

things of the spirit, or the soul,
shine forth rarely in most daily rituals,
which go on trying to make ends meet,
which sounds deceptively easy, but
we lose sight of what we join together,
to form closed circuits of meted ends;

life is like water in a leaky bucket,
constantly oozing and dripping,
slowly emptying itself, voiding itself,
ever needing renewal, spring fresh--
some new water diluting sediments
which ever grow crustier and saltier;

ways of life avert while they control
by abnormal nourishings
for momentary flourishings:
dust-bowls, barren deserts
and forbidding wastelands
briefly blossom and growing live,
in entangled gardens of living love
which can not be self-sustaining
but are still worthy, unobtaining,
as a whole that we already are:
we haunt us, we come back to us,
we know us in our loves from afar.

Thanks for listening
Donald L Emerick

(And my above-saying poem is also a love-offering,
suitable for reverend use though differently religioned,
as it speaks for me, and is wholly replaced by you.)