© James Rovira 2014

God of Life (an Easter 2014 poem) I sing to you, God of Life. I sing of your uncounted protozoa writhing like galaxies in whirlpools of micrscopic aether. I sing of your water flea with his radiant crown of thorns. I sing of your diatom, spinning discus of life. I sing of your fairy-fly wasp, twin-feathered peacock of the microscope. I sing of your zebrafish with its flourescent brainbows, pulsing neural system of the invisible world. I thank you that I am your microbiota, teeming community of E. coli (but not O157:H7), A. viscosus and A. naeslundii, the methogens and Candida who dine at my table, but most of all the glorious lactobacillus acidophilus of my love, who with L. iners and L. crispatus are guardians of the gates of heaven. I sing of the gnats and roaches and mosquitos and biting midges that I want to kill though I no see um. I sing of your uncounted trillions of blades of grass, each one a harried stock exchange trading sunlight and water, earth and sky. I sing of the trees with bare arms reaching upward in embrace, who blossom when kissed by an opulent sky. I sing of the odd little blue bird flitting in my backyard yesterday, of the cow with her long slow peaceful hum, of the powerful horse and the stupid sheep. I sing of the goldfish at the Chinese restaurant with their mouths slowly going maow maow maow maow. I sing of my children with their saucered brown and hazel eyes, their relative insanities and their love for all things furry and doggy and guinea-piggy. I sing of my wife, body of possibility, author of my future life, mother of my all living. I sing of you, God of the billions of heavenly luminescences, whose light and song fill the blackness of space in whom we live and move and have our being. Our God is a promiscuous God, a prolific God of untold pleasures, God of massive unrestraint whose love sprials outward in an infinite glut of teeming life. Our God is a self-indulgent artist with whose work we are never bored: whose work we are. I sing of you God of Life, whom nothing could kill but the hovering crossbeam of religion nailed to the upright pole of politics. They nailed your open arms down before you could close them in your loving embrace. I sing of you, God of Life, who loves faggots, queers, dykes, liberals, commies, niggers, spics, NRAers, Jews, Tea Partiers, and uppity, backtalking women. I sing of you, God of Life, who does not hate. I sing of you, God of Life, whom they could still kill. Whom they could still kill. I sing of you, God of Life, but: why? How? Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani. I sing of you, God of the broken stick, God of betrayal. I sing of you, God of Life, whom you let kill. Whom you let kill every day, nailed to the selfsame tree every moment, every hour, every day, year, decade, and century. "This is my body..." But I should not give a whit, man, that you let them kill you. I sing of you, God of Life, because you live.