To those who never get to verse 3...

I was hoping we would vote this blog back open, but I do appreciate the hesitancy, maybe even moreso as I realize what I want to talk openly about.  It is the very thing that nearly got Dan in trouble: trying to understand and even empathize with the despair of a friend who did not know God and/or did not want to live.  If we are to believe that life, and God, is good, why can’t we talk about it?  And when life isn’t easy, when we cry out for help in our unbelief, as perhaps even Tony did, why should we be stifling this?

Here is a poem I had started writing just before Dan had been told to remove his postings.  I had written and emailed Dan a partial version of this poem, which then ended before the denouement, at “God is love,” but I have since finished the poem.  Or maybe it isn't finished yet.  The title, at least, is only a working title: its reference, picking up on my last poem, is to Genesis1:3.


To those who never get to verse 3

To say that God knows those who don’t know God
Should not offend those who do not believe
In the existence or the mind of God,

But they might be insulted who do not
Find comfort in whatever they believe,
Those for whatever reason knowing God
As one who doesn’t care or won’t receive
Their prayers, the hopeless souls who think that God
Is never there, and anyone who’s thought
That God hates those who struggle to believe
That God is love...
                             But this I do believe,
That God will walk with those who don’t know God
And weep with those who say he wasn’t there
And listen to an unbeliever’s prayer.


Also posted on Poems by J.A. Vold

Rolihlahla

Rolihlahla was named for making trouble.

His teacher, knowing him or not, changed

his name to Nelson, aiming him to alter

the nature of the state. Being estranged

and yet a native son, Madiba became

the conscience of the world. The rainbow

over flood-forgiven lands, a flag unfurled

in the promised love that God bestows,

is raised half-mast today. The troublemaker’s

dead. His lionized life sleeps at last,

having lain down with the lamb (a wolf disguised)

and shouldered an unbearable past.

Who stands to make trouble with peace in mind?

Who strives beyond the murk of humankind.

Between Thanksgiving and Advent, 2013

My creed begins believing
   that life is good:
the breath and the beat of it,
the wake and the feel of it,
the wonder and the find of it,
the pose and the prose of it,
the challenge and the dare
and the fight of it and then
hoping it might never end
even as light touches the horizon,
the seeing and the saying
   that it is good,

As it was in the beginning, when
day first replaced the night:

In the beginning the Poet wrote
  the tangibles and the intangibles.
But the lines were formless and empty
  and it was too dark to see the Poem’s depth.
So the Poet breathed life into the Poem,
  a breeze across the surface of the deep.
This Poem needs light, the Poet said,
  and there it was, and the Poet could see
     that it was good,

Is now and ever shall be, when
night changes into day.

Poetry precedes religion, said an editor,
and religion dims its energy.
Inevitably.  But renouncing religion
is renouncing that which would see
the life within the poetry.
I’m paraphrasing, of course,
looking for the words to see,
looking beyond complacency
and wanting to believe in more
than an old catastrophe,

And past the old dependency
of day and night and day.

In the beginning, said someone else,
  trying to make more sense of it,
  turning the phrase of an older testament,
was the Poem. And the Poem was with
  the Poet, was the Poet, and the Poet,
  who wrote everything, was the Poem.
And the Poet breathed life into the Poem,
  and in this life was the light for all to see.
But the darkness could not comprehend this light,
  so the Poet sent a man out into the world,
  someone named Religion,
and Religion came as the Poet’s witness
  to speak of the Poem’s light
  with words for all to believe,

But Religion’s words were never
meant to be the Poem itself.

Religion, the editor said, is a bit crude,
encrusting.  And yet it persists,
asserting and assenting to
the force that moves through the verse,
not with vanity but vulnerability
and not with idolatry but humility,
opening eyes to a power
that can never be owned,

And it rejoices at the sunrise,
even as its purpose fades away.

My creed continues its premise
   that life is good.
It’s what I have to give to you,
all you will ever need,
what you will struggle to accept
and learn to look beyond,
the season and the turn of it,
the give and the take,
the light past every sunset,
all that cannot be seen
and the saying, seeing still,
   that life is good.