Theopoiesis
Theopoiesis1
Somewhere, amidst all the chaos and roar
of a world completing its own infant form,
is a spark of intelligence waiting to breathe
in the gases of life, in the swell of the sea.
Fiat lux, some people say are the words
that began our whole lifetime, our era, our age;
but this world makes itself, shunning the help
of extraneous forces that smother its growth
towards perfection of form and its immanent laugh
that seethes in the lava of ancient displays,
terrestrial mountains that heave towards the sky,
the grasses that cover our follies and sins
in our quest for eternity, not ever found
though we struggle on, clutching at sticks and dry bones
of our ancestral race that, collapsing, allowed us
to find our own paths that we buried in haste,
afraid to move on without some guiding hand;
and thus for ourselves we engendered our gods,
gods that create though created themselves;
and still we continue to blind our own eyes,
Oedipal children of some broken hand
that will shatter us just as we shattered our lands.
In the gathering dark of our misguided trials
lurk impotent seeds of both evil and good
which the glittering icons of damnable faith
raise on ivory pedestals crafted of lies
that man eagerly swallows while gasping for air
in the hectic arena of soul-crushing life,
so that now he is owned by mechanical bliss
while his fragments and fantasies dwindle and fade
till he crumbles beneath an incredible emptiness,
carried aloft by the fires in his soul
to be dropped so he cracks like a porcelain egg,
but his nursery-rhymes fled from the hell-hounds of God
so he has no king's horses and men to rebuild him
and slowly he fades into unblessèd dust
as the earth, not so young, but not old, grinds him down;
until one day a blossom unfolds from his grave,
bearing neither the fruits of his evil nor good,
but a beauty of cyclical living and dying,
the beauty we gave to our gods not for us
but for that which is thought unobtainable, sacred,
untainted by blemish of coarse mortal hands.
Not for this did the world conceive of itself,
in the void universe bear its labors and pangs,
but for joy and the generative spark of creation,
a light that was slain when we first slew ourselves.
Theopoiesis: the making of god(s)
Previous Poem | Back to Table of Contents | Next Poem