God Was Hiding

Faith cannot be held as an old grey hand
Nor as a breath to put voice to prayer
In faith I rendered a final exchange
And faced a dying bed for my refrain
I asked to be spared of this tragedy
To find peace and solace in calamity
I prayed to hear my name spoken by him
But there was no god out there to liste

The end owes resemblance to beginnings
As I earned the resemblance of my son
The crown emerged from beyond the curtain
Until the labor bore a perfect child
By then I stopped wasting breath to pray
Instead to watch the first breath of new life
And held the perfect child in my own arms
Sure there was no god out there to listen

Now I recognize the price of his laws
The end is coming true as beginnings
The labor in waiting felt just the same
An unseen portal drank the spirit veil
Until the first of final breaths did take
Hours until the breathing subsided
The body became a clever facade
Old grey hands with the trace warmth of life lived
Yet the spirit had departed from it
There was no god out there to account to

There is only the god that we could amount to:
Each labored breath will end as it began
Each perfect child is owed their old grey hands
Each being held in young hands at the end
Each mouth should be fed where there is hunger
Each body should be clothed where flesh made cold
And each and every prayer should be answered

All this time there was no god that listens
That coward was always hiding in us
As we searched for a god of resemblance
To deny our resemblance to each other
Prayer has always been a call to action
That all this time we went on ignoring
With avoidable insularity
The god and the self viewed with clarity
That all this time we were god and its creation: a singularity

Daniel Cano was born and raised in Mormon-centric Utah County in the State of Utah. He departed from his former faith as a teenager and has taken the position of an involved agnostic atheist with clear Christian cultural influences that appear in his writings. He is of mixed heritage with some part of that heritage being attributable to Native Interior Mexico. His poems explore themes of Apostasy, grief, reconciling religious experiences with the bleakness of reality, the search for belonging in pedigree and the erasure of native ancestry.

Image: Mike LoCascio, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons