Implosion

I.

The imploding society sits in the pit of imbeciles

nursing on blood-myths their leaders sing.

The songs of their sirens are beautifully wrought

being cover-ups for the vulgarities of law.

Their dead words enliven the poisoned air

their morality, justification for their crass suppositions.

They poke about swamps for the remnants of regret

searching for something to be sorry for.

"Shock and awe" encircle their lips

their mouths encrusted with a pestilence of lies.

We follow without question, groveling in fear

lest be be terrorized midst their promise of freedom

for these torturers punish the least suspecting

being escapees from public demotion.

II.

Inward we'll fall into hellish destruction

of persons, of values, of a once treasured life

fodder strewn on the old land dying

awakening life, now barren and sour.

*Thoughts of Frederick Buechner:

  -...if we come to church right, we come to it more fully and nakedly ourselves, come with more of our humanness showing, than we are apt to come to most places.  We come like Moses with muck on our shoes - footsore and travel-stained with the dust of our lives with us, our failures, our deceits, our hypocrisies, because if, unlike Moses, we have never taken anybody's life, we have again and again withheld from other people, including often even those who are nearest to us, the love that might have made their lives worth living, not to mention our own.  Like Moses we come here as we are, and like him we come as strangers and exiles in our way because wherever it is that we truly belong, whatever it is that is truly home for us, we know in our hearts that we have somehow lost it and gotten lost.  Something is missing from our lives that we cannot even name - something we know best from the empty place inside us all where it belongs.  We come here to find what we have lost. We come here to acknowledge that in terms of the best we could be we are lost and that we are helpless to save ourselves.  We come here to confess our sins.

  -It is the same voice that Moses heard and that one way or another says GO! BE! LIVE! LOVE!  sending us off on an extraordinary and fateful journey for where there are no sure maps and whose end we will never fully know until we get there.