Religious Poems

Meditations on religious poetry as I enter my religious era as a poet, with examples from my own poems.

Here is a religious poem I wrote recently:

     I walked backward
     to the beach
     and when I felt
     my heels reach
     the water, I 
     faced the sea.
     Then God faced me.

Religious poems are better, I have found, when brief. When I write for too long or strive too much, it starts to feel like I’m trying to win some weird argument no one has asked me to have with them.

Rule one for me as a religious poet is be brief.

Here’s another short one. All the other poems in this post are new, but this one, entitled “Church,” was in my last book:

     Whenever I go back to church as an adult
     I gnaw a little on the pew in front of me
     like I’m a beaver trapped in human form
     and the wood tastes exactly the same as it did
     when I was a child, and I am comforted.

This poem, in addition to being brief, is somewhat flippant toward conventional notions of piety. Instead of painting an idealized portrait of faith, it reluctantly acknowledges the vaguely craven and sometimes deranged (but nonetheless comforting) comforts that come with surrendering to religious familiarity. If there’s one god you could objectively say we all worship, it’s nostalgia. For me, it’s the criticism of and submission to this nostalgia that is most likely to earn for the speaker some small squib of credibility when it comes to his final assertion that, despite the absurdity of it all, church does have some positive, if not saving, effect on him.

Rule two for me as a religious poet is to be flippant or go home. The compromised and inglorious nooks of religious sentiment are like verdant oases to my religious muse, and the big theological claims and stances and doctrines are like irradiated wastelands.

Here’s another religious poem I wrote:

     When very tall people meet someone new
     they often hear a joke that references height.
     Seekers of good poems about religion
     are like extremely tall people who wait their whole
     lives trying to meet someone who
     upon meeting them will do more than make fun 
     of their height, and most religious poems
     are like people who, upon meeting a super tall person,
     attempt to engage them with humor based on height. 

This isn’t a very good poem at all.

Paradoxically, I think it’s a perfectly okay religious poem.

What makes it ok, to me, is that religious poems are so bad in general, that a poem doesn’t even have to be a good poem to be a good religious one. It just needs to criticize bad religious poetry or the attitudes, behaviors, and arguments that, in their attempts to aggrandize God or, even worse, aggrandize belief in a particular doctrine, only end up diminishing God, usually due to a lack of effort, originality, or, saddest of all, willful ignorance of the naked self-interest powering almost every proselytory ambition.

Rule three (for me): reject or ignore sanctimonious religious perspectives.

Here’s another religious poem I wrote:

     God forgive
     the giant machines
     polishing the moon 
     down to the size
     of a pearl.

Once again, if this poem is any good, it’s barely so.

It’s also barely about God, but, I would argue, barely-about-God, when it comes to religious poetry, is very good.

I like the sci-fi premise and image of enormous machines tasked with transforming the moon into a pearl (even if it isn’t conveyed very clearly), and I also think our willingness to reduce objects of primeval splendor and inhuman scale (the moon) to smaller, more mutable objects of material value (pearl) is tragic and true.

But more than either of these two notions, I love the idea of someone concerned primarily with the souls of such machines, and, as a consequence, asserting that God remains the primary conduit for mercy, no matter how unconventional the beneficiary.

An earlier draft of the poem that didn’t include God at all:

     Giant machines
     polishing the moon
     down to the size
     of a pearl.

Disincluding the divine centers the meaning of the poem on its speculative premise. Shoehorning God into the opening line unnecessarily allows for all of the above to stay true, but be skewed. This to me is the role God is best suited for in the religious poetry I currently can write : a glancing presence, a treacherous wrinkle, a glib aside, a peripheral puff of vapor, the proverbial pebble in the Croc you’re too lazy to remove as you walk to the liquor store for Starbursts and Cîroc.

Here is a really stupid poem that pushes to the limit the notion of including God only glancingly. In my opinion, it is a good religious poem, but only because, as I have argued, the bar for that is so low that almost anything is a good religious poem so long as it avoids being overly long, sanctimonious, or one-dimensionally reflective of any particular doctrine. This poem is called “What They Do to Old Bulldozers.”

     Did you know when old bulldozers are no longer useful
     they get new bulldozers to bulldoze them into a pit 😭
     When the pit fills in, they don't cover it, it’s just old bulldozers
     at all kind of odd angles, exposed to the open sky 😮
     At night, their broken metal gleams
     like rusted bones in the dead moon’s cold illumination 😳
     They look like the knuckles of an iron god
     corkscrewing its way fist-first out of the earth 😲
     When we pass the great bulldozer pit on the train home
     every night from our jobs in the city we try to time 👉
     our turning away from the dead bulldozers so it looks like
     we aren’t turning away from them, but from each other 😬

For two reasons this poem is less religious than the other examples.

First, it uses the lowercase “god” instead of the more religious uppercase “God.”

Second, the line about “god” here is just a colorful (and obtuse) simile adding texture to a description of something else. That’s two strikes against its religiosity.

While I suspect that few readers of English poetry would ever consider any lowercase “god” real in even the most extreme metaphorical sense, I do think the presence of a lowercase god adds a hint of mystical or divine possibility to any poem.

At least we know the speaker who narrates the poem is open to using words that refer, on some level, to supernatural beings or planes of being.

I would further argue that this indirect, almost non-existent whiff of mysticism, when combined with the broader themes of death, burial, memorial, and our reaction to the reminders of death and decay that pervade the poem, infuse the poem with enough faith-adjacent concern to just barely knock it into the religious poem bucket (and make a small, sad splash in the inch of dirty water it contains).

Rule four: refer to God as glancingly as possible.

If my definition of religious poetry is expansive, I suppose it’s because that I believe, if God exists, then one of the most important aspects of God is God’s expansive nature.

For staunch believers, I think this is one of the easiest things to forget.

For non-believers, I believe it is is the easiest entry point for consideration of a relationship with something that is otherwise invisible, unprovable, and frequently invoked to accomplish base material or political objectives that couldn’t have less to do with eternity or ultimate reality.

The final poem I will share hopefully follows all of the rules I have set for myself, sort of like a self-imposed final exam for the mini crash-course of this essay. You can be the judge as to whether the poem passes or fails.

As I get further into my religious era, I will try to post more religious poems here, and hopefully they will get better.

     Philosophers need to obsessively lift weights.
     Bodybuilders need to read philosophy obsessively.
     Criminals need to study the law and become judges.
     Judges need to quit judging and sell drugs and do heists.
     Poets and painters need to play professional football
     and fight in wars they don't believe in. Football players
     and soldiers need to write poems and paint paintings they hate.
     Ghosts need to have sex and find jobs with good health insurance. 
     People need to hang out in old buildings, obsessing about the past. 
     God needs to exist more obviously, and time needs to exist less obviously.
     Money needs to be worth less, even though it's already worth nothing.
     Love needs to actually save the world, not just be something worth saving.