by Kirby Congdon…….

In the 31st of May edition the New York Times broaches the topic of atheism on the front page of its Sunday Review, allowing that even agnostics can still be nice people. My own work tried to cope with the situation in an early poem, “I Walk on Sand” (1986). In it the narrator suggests that every life has an effect, however transitory, on the whole of existence even if heaven is only an imaginary place.

This writer got closer to the subject in a more involved poem that reminds us that the passive symbol of the Christmas tree comes from an ancient pagan rite. Its importance does not lie in any proof of what is real since the whole she-bang only stands for itself: the gaudy, the showy, the acceptance of tradition for its own sake. The assertion it makes is simply that anything one does has its own persuasions, whether it is for art, for affection, for any creative skill or for life itself that makes the indifferent meaningful, letting our very breath take on a sense of the holy– whether we have read the Bible or not. Here is the poem:

Totem

Archaic totems stand erect,
confront us,
singular, single, direct.
All myths are fantastic plans
–however studied or complex.
Still, such care taken
can extend and, so, exceed
the longest look made
of the casual sight’s eye.
Blind, we see the sun
and, mute at such effects,
lose our speech
–so tongue-tied we are
at a universe of such surprise
rising, proud, in dark corners
of an otherwise ordinary room.
What brazen hope testifies
for the world to change?
What hell-on-earth survives
in that standing flame
where night reflects the sun
and starlight shines at noon?
Yet, for all our histories,
indifferent, thoughtless, crude
or for any rude glory
that to the likes of us may come,
that dead tree’s myth,
like real truth, though false
in all that glitter, blooms.