If God was never beaten into you but grew
naturally instead, between two blue abstracts
of Sorrow and Birth, you would have gazed
with the openness of an infant
at the breast of a depressed mother
and taken it all in.

You would be unafraid of sadness in others,
recognize it as common, how it dwells in eyes
and in wilderness where springs well up, weeping
faces of stone walls where trees hang on
against all odds.

You’d hear loneliness in a ping, echoing
of a raven caw, a stone dropped into a hollow place,
wings like knives cutting the blue silence.

You’d find delight in the heavy ringing
of steeple bells, but lose count of the marked hours,
always somewhere between sleep and rising.
Praying could feel like mere daydreaming.

Sermons couldn’t adhere to you,
they’d separate or join like mercury drops
loosed from broken thermometers.
After a while only poetry would make sense.

In any given moment you’d know birth
is present, opposite sorrow, possible
and possibly God, laughter, or anything
expanding light from a dark blue core.

~Noël Hanlon