Prey fore the dead
In the name of Jesus
In resurrection of those soully asleep
Getting a phallus rise
Out of Christianity
That is, US
More sow then radical Islam
In violate fundamental lists
Dissembling faith, hope, and love
As our trinity project
Our won God triumph a writ
With a Cain due attitude
Over awe that is Abel
To spill the good word
Buy blood crying out
Too me
From the ground
A brother lying
Knot knowing
The hollowed meaning
Of I am
One’s keeper
I often write about stuff triggered when I hear the news. I listen faithfully to Democracy Now on weekdays. It’s not unusual to stop in the middle of a show, or even a news story, to write a poem about something that touched me: a phrase worthy of seeding a poem, an issue baffling human kind, or simply a heartfelt emotion.
The literal life and death issues of war and peace, militarism and pacifism, have been close to my heart my whole adult life. The latest flavor of this is the unending war on terrorism, which easily commiserates with virulent patriotism, nasty nationalism, presumptive racism, and irreconcilable religious bigotries. Our unconscious privilege, convenient distance, and well-earned ignorance of world affairs is complicit with any easy alliance of violence as a lazy alternative to costly self-sacrifice as the true weigh of incarnating justice for all. Nominal Christianity and its state-sponsored sheep, hawk a cheap grace bound only by an unequaled military budget and unquestioned reverence for a mercenary class.
I have a more generous perception of a frightened citizenry in deed resorting to violence in an increasingly secular, postmodern worldview. Violence seems inevitable, certainly unendurable, without a resilient weigh to measure the sacred worth of an other, a brother human, who peers threatening. I have a less generous view of normalizing violence by those aspiring to be religious, deeply commuted to any of the major faith-based worldviews represented by the world’s religions. In the case of the U.S., the purported rock of our moral lives is Christianity. I assert that an honest appraisal of American Christianity regarding its world military domination is that it is ruggedly cross. 
American Christians quiet reliably in efface of violence, instead of bearing the rugged cross, demand the blood sacrifice of “others” as their savior. To this I can only say, “Jesus Christ!” Whose image due we bear?! What about state violence has to do with the heart, life and death of Jesus — other than the fact that it was state violence that executed Jesus.
To add insult to injury, the budget-sized war we christen as terrorism, we blame on Muslims, or worse yet, on the sacred tenets of Islam. The real competition may be about who has the shallowest understanding of their religion: nominal Muslim terrorists or nominal Christian war apologists. I strongly suspect that the farces of Christianity have killed more people than the farces of Islam. Regardless, the age-old story of Cain and Abel, shared in the sacred texts of both Christianity and Islam, plays out over and over: brother kills brother and denies the essential nature of their kin relationship and how family should care for one another. May people of faith lead the way in ending violence between all peoples. This goes triple for “People of The Book” (Jews, Christians, and Muslims).
Browse anti-terrorism designs.
