Ask me about religion
And I will tell you I have none,
No books command my soul,
No preachers or priests, flawed humans in control.
The universe is my temple,
The stars are the heavens of which the ancients spoke,
My conscious is my compass.
My love is my true north.
It aligns with the center of my chest,
Illuminating the path through this world to the next.
Science proves the evidence for creation,
A miracle far larger than any told in the fairytales that cornerstone the arcane doctrines of modern man.
Ask me about faith
And I will swear I am held by it,
Comfortable with the notion
That all things manifest as they should.
I keep bright the light within
And trust the movement of spirits tied to me by love alone
To guide me through this passage,
So I walk fearlessly upon the earth,
My temporary home.
Ask me about prayer
And I will say the words that come forth,
Unfettered and unrehearsed,
From the core of my existence
By ignition of perceptible burn
Radiating with the warmth of sincerity,
And I will whisper them soundlessly
To the winds that carry the souls of countless lovers and others
Released from their being
Long before our names are called.
Ask me about death
And you will see I have no fear of it,
Except that it might be untimely
Upon my children or me,
For a mother must attend as long as she can
But not outlive her usefulness
And be a burden to her young who are burdened with their young.
Death is merely a return
And it is only hard for the living.
Ask me about life
And I will summarize the aforementioned idealities
Of faith and love and light,
Of fearlessness and prayer,
Ungoverned by a ruling class of vicars educated in the obsolete
And misguided in their vision of our human evolution.
For we are not the children of a god
All seeing and all knowing,
But fragments of a universe it created,
Perhaps by its death.
We are sparks of light and chemistry
Exploding momentarily
In subatomic works of art,
Created and recreated
Across an inconceivable vastness,
A landscape of time and space
Imperceivable to its residents
Eternal in their truest form.
Live.
Just live
Through all the love you can endure,
And perish
From this life
With grace
And the knowledge that this is not all of it
And you need not know the rest.
September 26, 2019
Jill-Arcangela Mancuso 