For everyone the human’s God
Ever certain, ever just
Ever loving, ever true,
Jehovah God in whom we trust
And cannot ever misconstrue
But as the flood-waters slid back
And Noah began his new day
How long before God’s chosen
Exposed himself in drinking,
Like all those judged and swept away?
When Enoch cried out to his God
For rescue amidst wicked men
The help: a surprise when it came along,
A lesson for all,
Was God killing him, not them.
Was Samson a cruel Pyromaniac?
Or did he reap God’s harvest’s desire
As he loosed three-hundred foxes
Bound,
In pairs - with their tails on fire?
Why should God, with all the might,
Prefer such ruses de guerre,
And practices of scheming
Cunning plans,
For his generals foul and fair
Whose heart can love Fool Jephthah?
Ambitious for his nation
Who offered up a random life:
One daughter,
To advance Israel's station
Did Abram’s nephew love his daughters
And fill himself with wine
To erase the pictures of his own shame,
Red and clear,
The pictures from his mind
When Abraham haggled over lives
In the coinage of a righteous God
Were there tears of laughter in heaven?
At Sodom,
Or at saving the family of Lot?
Who cannot mourn for little Isaac?
That his father's godly terrors
Led him so easily with a lie, a rope,
And a killing knife,
Up the mountain of his errors
As David’s Ark of the Covenant listed
And strong men watched it slide
When one braced his body to save it,
For this
God struck, and one died
And He never found within His heart
The forgiveness of mere men
But needed the blood of innocence,
To drip and stick
Upon his altars, again and again
Just as then, the earth cries out
When incidental lives are lost,
To the specter of that sanguine God's
Self-loathing,
For His petty pride, the cost
For all these loved a human God:
Not always certain, nor just
Not always successful,
Nor even true,
Jehovah God whom still we trust
And cannot ever misconstrue
philo