This poem, just finished, was a response begun years ago to a long night of argument with a man who called himself a Christian but belonged to an extreme, politically conservative wing of the religion characterised by its incredible, nauseating intolerance. Which has nothing to do at all, as far as I know, with the message of peace, love and universal compassion taught by Jesus. If you stick with the poem, you'll see I'm not mocking Christianity so much as rationalised bigotry and hatred.
EIGHT HOURS AT WORK ARGUING ABOUT GOD WITH A
CHRISTIAN
Tonight the
imbeciles are out in force.
You've wittered on
for hours (you’re still not hoarse)
about Heaven,
Jesus' resurrection.
You’ve laughed at
natural selection.
You’ve flashed your
beatific Christian smile
and said humanity
is sinful, while
expressing
certainty that you’ve been saved.
You’ve told me
alcoholics are depraved;
condemned all
junkies; said they’re criminals.
You've claimed low
earners lack the wherewithal
to make their own
luck as you have done,
a leafy
middle-class suburban son.
I’ve offered
arguments, annoyed and bored,
but you’ve
continued. You have too much Lord
to give up at five
hours, six or seven.
It’s your job to
drag lost souls to Heaven.
And yet the torch
of God inside you fails
porn stars, pole
dancers, thieves and Muslim males,
and women who abort
their unborn child.
They, more than
anybody, you’ve reviled.
You’ve asked how
many times we must forgive.
You’ve said there
is decay; that how we live's
corrupt, where it
was clean as spring rain, pure,
in the Fifties,
when nobody would lock their door,
and upright girls
never masturbated.
(But gay men were
poisoned and castrated.)
If you've been trying to recruit me, man,
you've failed.
We've ended where we both began.
Perhaps your Heaven
might make sense to me
and other Heathens
if we didn’t see
such bigotry in
you. ‘Judge not,’ God warns,
unless you want to
meet the bloke with horns.
Perhaps you'd take
a few more strays to glory
if you didn’t sound
like such a Tory,
and one Charles
Dickens might have recognised:
all church, hard
work and healthy exercise.
Being black, you
say, makes you a Labour man.
I've told you twice, I
don't see how you can
be, thinking
welfare should be cut long-term:
one year, perhaps
or ‘they’ will never learn
to get up off their
backsides like you did;
‘they’ll’ make a
soft life on the dole instead.
No Labour person
would ever think that way,
and I doubt that
Christ would ever speak of ‘they’.
All true adherents
of the great faiths know,
and frankly I
shouldn’t have to tell you so,
‘they’, mate, are
‘we’ and ‘we’ is only ‘I’
a billion billion
people multiplied.
When you stand singing at your local church
with the monied
Baptists, have you ever searched
your Bible, and
found a passage, even one,
where God says, 'Hey, you're rich, salvation done?'
I think you'll find
it's 'Give it to the poor',
and when I say I
think, I mean I'm sure.
I think you'll find
it's 'Heaven’s gates are shut
to greedy and self-righteous bastards but
don’t worry, there’s another place for you.
It’s warm year-round and full of preachers too.'
.
.
