He Isn’t Job

Once he sang the hymns the loudest

and passed around the collection plate.

Now he has crumbled like Jericho’s wall

Wearing defeat around in his seventy-eight year-old eyes

 

He removed the troubles of others from his back

and he stopped praying.

He sits in a recliner on Sunday

trying to forget that he ever knew a god.

 

His unfilled penances leave him in debt.

He doesn’t believe the creditor will come,

doesn’t believe the creditor exists.

Wouldn’t like the creditor anyway.

 

His faith has been abandoned

and he doesn’t ask the questions anymore

that his forgotten God stopped answering

 

The separation between God and man is filled

with angry curses and old unanswered prayers.

 

Peter, one second before the cock crowed for the third time,

Judas Iscariot with the payment,

the movement away from knowing God

is the direction this man takes knowingly.

 

He doesn’t feel like blindly believing anymore,

He can no longer attribute pain to the greater good.

He’s beyond praying off tears and the let-downs of God.