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.