But don’t be only
soft of heart

use your head
to play your part

and make the language
a good friend

then happy after
all will
end.

Attitudes at Altitudes

The other side of the mountain
collects
and even cultivates
its mystery

I’m quite secular myself
but I have no problem
with religion

in fact I encourage it

How do I encourage it?

You might ask.

With my sentences. . . .

Vantage point . . .
Plate-blue sky . . .
Plateau of clouds . . .

Good God.

They trail off.

I’m a bit nervous, because this is my first ‘like/dislike’ posting.

OK…I can do this…

Let us admit the Reverend Gary Fitzgerald has uttered two poems; but one features the tired old cliche, ‘How can God love us if things are so bad?’ and the other seems to be demonstrating the notion that birds fly faster than people walk across bridges.

My point, Mr. Fitzgerald, is that poems such as these garner no religious authority; they skate over the subject, they don’t engage the topic in such a way that the general public would ever take notice; they remain simply, *poems,* which is fine, but they don’t rise to anything more.

For instance, I would never consider myself a religious poet just because I wrote the following poem:

Whale Island

As I approach Whale Island
I notice there are no whales
And no islands. There is
Nothing but sentimentality
Of story in someone else’s words.
“You go to Whale Island,”
The elders told me,
With knowing wink and nod,
The grin we see which says
All one needs to know
Of the real life and the real God.

So here I am approaching
Whale Island, that those who are gone
Never got around to seeing
Because they were saying
Something else for a long time,
The usual things one says on the sod
In a coat of flesh, with no understanding of God.

Now Whale Island, in all its beauty,
Looms in front of me.
I laugh because Anita Gota
Shared a laugh with me
When I used the word
“Looms” in a journalism project.
Every time we saw “looms” in a newspaper
We laughed.
Here it is. Whale Island.
Now isn’t this odd?
I cannot tell, either,
Why there is laughter and fever
And unrequited love forever
For all who toil or trip on sod,
Howling in their suit of flesh
For what was once so beautiful and fresh
Before Whale Island was mentioned, or God.

Or, this one:

Ah Yes

Scooped from a plum among birds singing,
Nature ate her full while mankind looked on.
Why is there so much eating? Why death?
Nature, drooling, said, “Ask the sun.”
Why does nature permit this holocaust?
Why is death allowed its eternal mockery?
Why do the sons of memory perish in the frost?
Why is our wisdom dominated by mouth and elegy?
Why is our calendar peppered with death?
Love drinks clear streams and still has foul breath.
Nature chews on its tail, looks at me with blank eyes.
Nature, ignorant of history, eats, flying as it flies.
The poop littered the trail. The senator instructed the committee
That hope and commerce were good and we would be free.

Like you, Mr. Fitzgerald, I am not challenging religion or providing an alternative to religion; I am simply musing philosophically in my poems on what religion builds upon.

We, my dear Gary, are not Milton, Keats, Shelley, or Poe.

Thomas

Religion

How reconcile this paradox,
this Creator who loves creation,
with the brutality and blood
that makes it turn,
this endless flow of life,
forms granted their existence
by the eating of each other,
the bewildered, starving young
still awaiting their dead mother?

How resolve dearth of compassion,
this cruelly designed summation
by the One who loves us all,
those lost to fire and fang and flood
or blown from nests in storms?

We will reason, for we are human
and create our fine Religions
which our reason then deforms.

.
Copyright 2008 – HARDWOOD-77 Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald

.
AND:

.
Sunday On The Rio Religio

A wide river, as black as space
and swift; impossible to swim.
It has swallowed many a soul and craft.
So many bridges built to defeat the current
and each week the faithful tramp across them,
marching from their humble homes
to the hope on the farther side.
The bridge is long, for the river’s wide,
stretching to re-link the here to there,
the brighter to the dim

It’s a long walk across this bridge
and as we walked and walked and walked
from lost to leading side,
we watched the river move and slide
beneath us. We saw a bird fly across.
The wings of her natural spirit took her
over in half the time.

.
Copyright – SOFTWOOD-Seventy-eight Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald

I think that for this novel of love between people who are no longer young, and a woman whose life has long been repressed and subservient to others, the dryer style is just right.