Lamar Howell's Weblog

EMERGENCY?

A tornado is an act of God
A cyclone, a hurricane or monsoon
A tidal wave and tsunami
You name it. What is not covered
by insurance is laid in God’s lap
Sunspots, renegade asteroids,
the San Andreas is God’s fault too.
Does God just hiccup or burp
and sometimes throw up on us
out of some cosmic vendetta?
He lets evil go on, we charge,
and suffering too,
And we think he is bluffing,
that we have a full deck
and he has no clue
or that he sits up there all deadpan
and overlooks me and you.
Listen, justice is ours to show
and vengeance his at the end of the day
Mercy is our lot and love the measure
He did all he could do with his voice
and commands, his uplifted right hand
his courage as a man
when personal disaster fell
He knows it full well
The tornado-spun lies
The hurricane of accusations
The convulsing earth choking with blood
The soot-black power outage of God’s grief
The overwhelming waves of garden prayer
The tsunami weight of water-logged beams
Emergency?
You and I are his emergency. Our fast-sinking souls
the chaotic refuse-filled rooms of our thoughts
Our proud independence to stand atop the rubble
and shake our fists in his face.
Oh, lets kneel down!
crunching the aluminum cans
and rattling leftovers of self-made lives
and bend low to smell the stench of
man-without-God waste that we walk and repose in.
Then we can find salvation.