Reality Check

The Call

When we call on God, we always find him out,
away on business maybe, lost in a world of his own,
performing miracles for distant universes, volunteering
to undergo humiliation all over again on another planet’s
equivalent of a cross to which his credulous disciples
nail their colours as a drowning man clings to a mast.

He is otherwise engaged perpetually—lines busy;
no menu of options offering access to the top—
his supplicants fobbed off with white-collar staff,
parochial-minded men handling his clients like constituents;
clerical workers undertaking to pass on petitions, insisting
the final decisions fall totally outside their sphere.

We are disillusioned by this failure to meet us face-
to-face, his abdication from fair play when all we ask
is mercy for patients sweltering feverishly through blue
surgical gowns, a softening of his line on chronic pain,
repeal of whatever law ordains that those dealt a poor
hand must suffer the consequences for life, a birth scar.

Is it conceivable that he still dotes on the very hairs
of our sceptical heads, eavesdrops on every arbitrary
phrase, like some benign celestial Nicolae Ceausescu?
Or is he no longer on speaking terms with mankind,
dismissive of the species as a bad day’s work, leading
his campaign trail to more docile outposts of his empire?

Has he ceased believing in his mission statement, lost faith
in his epoch-creating role? Can this universe have spun out
of his control, his conglomerate diversified so much that
a personal touch, a hands-on customer service, is unviable?
We want him to summon a mass gathering like an extraordinary
meeting of shareholders, feed facts to the multitudes this time.

If he has died, where are the oozing wounds to which our doubting
fingers can be applied? What are the chances he may rise again?
Once, his beatific smile graced all our houses like an ancestral
photograph or the graven image of a charismatic president or king.
Now the blanched patch left in its place must be brushed out,
the wall painted over, a hall mirror found to occupy that space.