as at the end of night

i walk in the night

stain my eyes, stub a toe

move toward the dawn

itching for the light

all about lay felled limbs

reaching out to snare me

night creatures molesting me

from the underbrush of their domiciles

i sense the chill of darkness

darkness cov'ring my dimming light

eating at whatever spark of hope

flits about my soul

each step is a prayer

a prayer for courage not to lay down and die

not to abandon childhood's believing

that out there somewhere sleeps the dawn

priming my eyes to mate her

to touch her light at the end of night

i push away the dross clinging like spider webs

poised to wrap a morsel in their silky hands

i press forward, toward, to glimpse the dawn

straining to greet her with a kiss

*John Paul comes to the defence of sexual intimacy.  He points out that intimacy is what's being betrayed.  Nietzsche - whom you have to thank for his candor - says that if you want to destroy Christianity, not to bother challenging its creed, because who cares?  If you want to destroy Christianity, you have to attack its ethic.  Fundamentally he's talking about the ethic of empathy for victims, but it's also implicit that the sexual ethic is part of what has to be held in contempt, and this is powerful.  We don't realize that the attack on the Christian sexual ethic is an attack on Christianity as such.  My reasoning comes from a reading of John Paul: we are made sexually, that is, with sexual differentiation, so we are made incomplete.  We are made for each other in an absolutely physical way.  Our sexual desires are a kind of homing device which makes us want the other, and it's that encounter with the other, at which Adam said, "This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh," that John Paul calls "the moment of hominization," the moment when mystery breaks in.... The mystery, the real human sacrament, is when they look into each other's eyes and say, This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh," which is an exclusive claim.

-Gil Bailie