by Mel Green

A poem for Prop 5, and for National Poetry Month, by Melissa S. Green.

No Questions, Questions

by Melissa S. Green

The man, smug in his pulpit,
has no questions.
He never has questions
except the rhetorical
question always followed
by his ready knowing answer read
from the book at his right hand:
the book at the right hand of God,
the book — the right hand of the judge
who judges the quick and the dead
to damn whoever fits
the words of his ready
answers read from that book.

I have questions…
What makes one so certain?
How does one live inside a closed book
behind closed doors in a windowless room
surrounded by a great great wall
blocking off all the horizons,
everything known, counted, familiar?
How does one live on a flat, flat Earth,
a horizonless planet where nothing new
ever walks, is seen, is encountered?
How does one breathe there?

How does one breathe where there are only
two kinds of people, the damned and the damning? —
and the smug man in his pulpit smiles,
knowing himself as the latter,
casting the former to flames,
smiling to serve such a God
who made things this way.

Somewhere beyond a horizon
on a round Earth set among stars
crafted by illimitable god,
I catch my breath.

Melissa S. Green
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
Anchorage, AK

About this poem

Most of this poem was written one June 2009 day on People Mover bus #36 during a long construction-interfered-with journey from University of Alaska Anchorage to the Loussac Library — on my way to hear yet more testimony on that year’s battle, the Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO-64. Just two days before I had watched Jerry Prevo’s Father’s Day sermon from his pulpit at the Anchorage Baptist Temple.  Same place, same circumstances, same ideologues — just a different year — as what drew the poem “Sermon” out of me in 1992, as what we have faced this year.

Rejoice today that you are not one of those who lives in the horizon-less, question-less world inhabited by those who follow the ideology being preached no doubt again from the same pulpit today.

As I wrote last Sunday,

Whatever the results of the April 3 election may be [because we actually don’t know them yet], whatever your religious beliefs or lack of beliefs may be, whatever lies are told about you by the likes of Minnery & Prevo, whatever demands are made even by the people you most love — your family, your friends: know you you are. Love who you are. Live with the integrity of self with which you were born into this world.

And breathe.

This poem was first published on my personal blog Henkimaa on 24 June 2009. Tip o’ the nib to James P. Carse whose The Religious Case Against Belief was a necessary friend in 2009. I recommend it.