Prayers of Adoration

I’m not really qualified to judge but I’m pretty sure no one who likes poetry will like these much.   I wrote Athesist, Tramps and Theives when I was a kid of twenty one or so and a new Christian.   I had been reading Tim Lahaye about the evil and pernicious agenda of the secular humanists (he seems to have been right about that.)  Then in a single day I had conversations with three different atheists and the poem kind of wrote itself.  It just leaped out of me as if it were great art or something.

This other poem is a parody of Sweet Home Alabama so you know it can’t be serious (not that the cultural allusions in the first one are any less low brow: Cher, beer commercials and football!)  I had moved from the South to Massachusetts shortly before the 1988 presidential campaign and got my political awakening.  It was not pretty.  It seemed clever to put a redneck boogie in the mouth of Michael Dukasis.

I just noticed a pattern: experience a wrenching conversion and then write a poem.  I think I’m done.