Unbeliever (poem)

 

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I am an unbeliever

some would say an atheist

but not toward this thing we call God

no, it’s more complicated than that

I look upon creation

and like Franklin see a Creator

but when my gaze falls from the stars

I see the steeples and domes of worship

It’s in that transition

from the Empyrean to Terra Firma

where my eyes shift from wide wonder

and furrows into suspicion

I can gaze into heaven

and believe. For despite the scapegoat of

‘mysterious ways’ and how the devil

‘walks about like a lion’ neither seems true

All I have ever witnessed with my eyes

or read in tomes of our history for good or for ill

has been wholly and inexcusably human

event after event in the affairs of man on earth

Yet I am not unconscious

of the hypocrisy of my myopic view

for I have never trod the path of angels

am the weakened flesh personified over and over

However, I do believe that sin

is rooted far more inside of intention

of evil than stumbling into it upon accident

when good intentions have paved our paths to Hell

It would take a God

to see what I see and yet still

love a church, synagogue, and mosque

and not become an atheist in his regard of man