445 Religion poems

All the time I pray to Buddha I keep on killing mosquitoes.

In a seaside desert port that wasn’t yet a city our grandfather built a wide house and called it gulistan There were no roses there just the new government four children that would be seven and a porch where he stitched shoes and mixed paste for paper maché book bindings He counted buds and tended love birds built their cage and bedecked it in blue and green and red foil this and gota that a cage the cat got into in front of the open water tankard the children got into during this or that fatal game Loose with life while their father cycled home in starched and ironed whites polished porch stitched black leather shoes a narrow mustache we now associate with genocide What is reverence anyway who writes the reverence rules After our grandmother died he developed a taste for Western sweets Flintstones pushpops and cokes and nerds Of all the things he typed and the typing was profuse none changed the course of history Like the verses of the Qur’an rendered in @ signs which he used as a coiled pixel taxing the Smith-Corona Coronamatic with his gridded plan Let’s hate the names of things like this Before they changed the world with typewriters the Smith brothers manufactured firearms Cartridge and ribbon bullet and thermal transfer Syracuse and gulistan Verses laid out in rows of @ seven @s in a vertical row to make an alif @s like a fallen E to make a tashdeed He did the whole Qur’an this way At some point in paleography they discovered this sign filling in for the A of Amen or Ameen in a Bulgarian version of a fourteenth century Greek chronicle Why and for whom or does The Book short circuit this question A smaller selection I have is a better plot for dirt ministrations just sura 8 ayah 46 inna Allaha maaAa al sabireen Allah is with the patient ones laid out in vertical reflection its geometry a formal garden hemmed by squares of @ looking in four directions paths and hedges of invocation borders of apostrophe trees of hail and leaves of call I wonder did he think his helical pixels looked like roses I wonder did he count the buds in every verse

Sin Título, from the series The Tempest, 1998, by Arturo Rodríguez I am the altar boy with feet flattened by the catechist’s paddle, my skin toasted like stalks of sugarcane at Lent, my shorts baptized in the salt pans of saints. I don’t wear a mask (God hates carnival) but a wool hood, Holy Week’s, that Sister Rose knitted by the charcoal altar, her wooden teeth clacking as she hymned in Latin, the moles on her jowl like prickly pears for penance. My own teeth are those grates that grilled the martyrs, & my little lamb’s ears quiver each afternoon when the wind coughs in fits and pale skies smoke with incense from a clandestine Mass, perhaps on a runaway shallop with sails sewn from stolen cassocks, perhaps on a newborn isle with a thatched church, novices crawling like iguanas around stations of the cross. There’s no home for orphans like us raised in a convent by the wharf where the footless angel blows his trumpet for vesper, and the abbess marches us to the clapboard altar when the cock crows. We sleep in straw cubbies, our sheets those crinkled newspapers that swaddled us like groupers in the foundling’s basket. Hey, you, girl with the twisted neck, your dollhouse will keep on shrinking between your dirty legs. Not even holy water can make you clean. Hey, boy, the more you pull on the kite, the more your house of dreams will get lost in summer’s wayward clouds. Let us live in the meadow, our true home, every bush a hearth, every pond a font: O blessed loam of nettles whose fireflies light the shrine at night, whose blue brooks spread out like veins of  Calvary.

Tulips panted against the wall.So much need to feed a crisp stem

A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears, Made of a heart and cemented with tears; Whose parts are as thy hand did frame; No workman's tool hath touch'd the same. A HEART alone Is such a stone, As nothing but Thy pow'r doth cut. Wherefore each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame To praise thy name. That if I chance to hold my peace, These stones to praise thee may not cease. Oh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine, And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.

There was a church in Umbria, Little Portion, Already old eight hundred years ago. It was abandoned and in disrepair But it was called St. Mary of the Angels For it was known to be the haunt of angels, Often at night the country people Could hear them singing there. What was it like, to listen to the angels, To hear those mountain-fresh, those simple voices Poured out on the bare stones of Little Portion In hymns of joy? No one has told us. Perhaps it needs another language That we have still to learn, An altogether different language.

God started small                     At the first showdown between good and evil       God didn’t come at anyone like a cowboy       God didn’t open with solar flares or asteroids       or mass extinction            or planetary heat death God didn’t outgun anyone               God outmanned them God made man        in the face of the beast And in the face of the beast      God made     —from inside the great and gaping maw         while languishing in the hot damp                           In the face of that great terror          God summoned the smallest— adrenaline        serotonin        hemoglobin        oxytocin        motes of possibility      God started by making— light into land masses      sand into vessels      preservation as civilization   and sometimes   God won

Holiness on the head, Light and perfections on the breast, Harmonious bells below, raising the dead To lead them unto life and rest: Thus are true Aarons drest. Profaneness in my head, Defects and darkness in my breast, A noise of passions ringing me for dead Unto a place where is no rest: Poor priest, thus am I drest. Only another head I have, another heart and breast, Another music, making live, not dead, Without whom I could have no rest: In him I am well drest. Christ is my only head, My alone-only heart and breast, My only music, striking me ev'n dead, That to the old man I may rest, And be in him new-drest. So, holy in my head, Perfect and light in my dear breast, My doctrine tun'd by Christ (who is not dead, But lives in me while I do rest), Come people; Aaron's drest.

The only thing under the sun I can run to is Ecclesiastes for there is nothing gathered into one self that can be kept Want is humbled by death as every purpose manifests it Feeling this all my life a piercing fright gathers in the stomach's pit This is it and this is not the end of the road for even despair is a kind of goad to wisdom The beauty of the world over one's own anguish The day that I lost all feeling I was both a Fool and a Goddess

When the first dark had fallen around them And the leaves were weary of praise, In the clear silence Beauty found them And shewed them all her ways. In the high noon of the heavenly garden Where the angels sunned with the birds, Beauty, before their hearts could harden, Had taught them heavenly words. When they fled in the burning weather And nothing dawned but a dream, Beauty fasted their hands together And cooled them at her stream. And when day wearied and night grew stronger, And they slept as the beautiful must, Then she bided a little longer, And blossomed from their dust.