A Child's Breath

A Child’s Breath

(1)

Orion’s hunting song is told when nights are long and cold.

All who listen to the wind hear the local version

Sung until the end of our great excursion.

Words press together in my throat like the vise jaw that traps,

Or the cold gust that snaps at the flame.

Beaver and Bear, Mink and Wild Goat,

I shout out their spirit name.

They are pelts now and none without flaw,

For each is marred gnawing its own limb,

Panicked and terror-filled,

Tearing flesh, its own teeth a prisoner’s saw,

Until exhausted, dies.

Scavengers that happen by further blemish my furs

Before I return to check my perpetual snares, retrieve my hides,

Reset the mechanisms.

I use also the teeth and bones, shaping them

To all manner of simple wares that remain

Permanent as stones.

These nights Orion strides above me all aglow

As I piss-carve his outline in the crusty snows below.

(2)

Animal skins line the hard-packed dirt floor and cover my children.

Small warmth to last against the northern wind

Until the annual thaw arrives, when

Orion, The Great One, disappears low into the west,

Nowhere to be seen by us.

I hunt, but I am not pure like the stars for I trap also,

As I confessed.

I will gather berries too, and when Orion is under world

And can no longer see my shame,

I will even plant the seed, but,

I am sure get the harvest in before he strides upon us once again:

Unchanged, Magnificent, Ageless, and without blame to

Track across the winter’s forest sky.

(3)

The wind announced its sorrow after the fire was down

When I count my children by their rhythmic breathing sound.

Each night death seems nearer, its aura intensified during

“The Months of the Long Nights.”

But as each night is nearly passed hope is created.

I bless their breaths.

Orion is not the cruel deceiver I am.

He baits no traps with lies.

He does not leave his dirty work to far-flung enterprise.

No, he is there when the world ends,

When whoever falls to him, dies

By his hand alone.

His star meadow is guilelessly sown in blood drops of light.

His eternal hunt is single-minded, untiring, unmoved by care or need,

As if the prey was not the end, as if the prey was seed to send.

Great Orion ignores my awe, returns it unused,

Even renewed.

(4)

Orion stalks a bold and joyous precession across the eons

Of our feeble time, as if my fur pelts did not matter.

He carries his possessions,

He need not fashion weapons.

The arms he uses

Forged long ago in deep time by bursts

And re-bursts that will likely long outlive our own,

Are never spent, never need replacement.

His belt is a hatchery of light that points each new year

Toward his hunting dog nipping

On the horizon of our aborning sun.

His fierce presence, amplified by cold and wind and death,

Scorns my fire as useless,

Does not chase its warmth,

Which leads me to believe he has no children.

(5)

As the stars disappear gradually,

So too the illusion I named, tomorrow.

The hallowed sun arrives as black night crawls to blue,

Blue becomes gray, gray begets gold.

The east wears the crown in the alchemy of dawn.

Orion the hunter is gone.

Resolve overlies my sorrow,

We replaced I,

You must replace me.

And in those cold dark times,

In those long winter months

When death is much upon our minds,

Orion leads me to your breaths

And the hope, though not the promise,

Of endurance.

I've seen hungry people share their food.

I have never seen anyone not born nude.

I have watched millions starve on TV as I ate dinner.

I have seen sweaty priests with boys in their pocket preach "woe to the sinner."

I have moved effortlessly on to all manner of atrocity dressed up in the evening news.

I've seen people risk (and even give) their own life for another.

I have seen people killed on orders from an invisible, mute being.

I believe these invisible beings must like the taste of misery.

I have seen friends take their own life, though I have not seen suicide among the other apes.

I have lost friends through my own deficiencies.

Sometimes that scrap of food we fight over is manna from heaven.

Sometimes that scrap of food we fight over is not flat bread at all, but a flat screen TV.

Sometimes that scrap of food we fight over is a flag.

Sometimes that scrap of food we fight over is a creed.

Sometimes that scrap of food we fight over is an idea.

Sometimes that scrap of food we fight over is pleasing to the ear.

Sometimes that scrap of food we fight over is organic brain disease.

Sometimes that scrap of food we fight over standing in my breeze.

Sometimes that scrap of food we fight over is a barrel of crude.

Sometimes that scrap of food we fight over is our mood.

Blessed Sacrament Church, NYC, When the Candles Were Real

It starts with an image held in my young mind of a giant Jesus, dead on His cross.

He hangs above the altar from the vaulted ceiling fastened by cables, thick as my six-year-old wrist.

The dead Savior sways in the slight breezes that skit through the church.

They are drafts from an open door somewhere, or cracks in a stained glass window.

Sometimes the gusts form from unseen, unsealed openings that are fueled by temperature differentials, and combine forces into a unified shuffle that carries through the pews, around the columns, under foot, kissing all the darkened corners, and ever threaten to extinguish the rows of madly flickering votive candles.

There is a lone red candle lantern near the altar.

It signals to the elect that God Almighty is present, safely ensconced in the locked tabernacle, inhabiting His Wafer Form.

Sometimes He is openly displayed in the solar monstrance.

I approach the votive stand.

Deposit my offering.

I borrow the flame of a burning candle, and pass it to the new.

I light the candle that it may burn and ignite His will to grant my wish.

I believe in this church magick.

I offer coins to pay for the dancing flame.

I surrender my skepticism, though I treasure a secret joke: “This is opposite from my birthdays, when offerings are brought to me, and I blow the candles out to make a wish come true.”

Jesus remains hanging by cables and trembling in the dark breezes of Blessed Sacrament, but the fire is gone, replaced by flameless battery power.

religion and the founding fathers

If we look back into history for the character of the present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practiced it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England blamed persecution in the Romish Church, but practiced it upon the Puritans. They found it wrong in Bishops, but fell into the practice themselves both there (England) and in New England."--- Benjamin Franklin

Why then should the tree of knowledge, which is far more romantic in idea than the parables in the New Testament are, be supposed to be a real tree? The answer to this is, because the Church could not make its new-fangled system, which it called Christianity, hold together without it. To have made Christ to die on account of an allegorical tree would have been too barefaced a fable. Tom Paine

"What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels, condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are the forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because suspected of heresy? Remember the 'index expurgatorius', the inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter and the guillotine." --- John Adams, letter to John Taylor

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose." --- Thomas Jefferson to Baron von Humboldt, 1813

"Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution." --- James Madison, "A Memorial and Remonstrance", 1785

And Finally we must note that George Washington, surveyor, wealthy planter, fox hunting sportsman, officer of the Virginia Militia, General of the Continental Army during the War of Independence, President of the Constitutional Convention, and First President of the United States was without a trace of "Christianism". He was so completely indifferent to its pious irascibilities that he never appears to have made any comment on them. Indeed, he seemed, according to the evidence, to have had no instinct or feeling for religion, although he attended church twelve or fifteen times a year.

The name of Jesus Christ is not mentioned even once in the vast collection of Washington's published letters. He refers to Providence in numerous letters, but he used the term as a synonym for Destiny or Fate. Bishop White, who knew him well for many years, wrote after Washington's death that he had never heard him express an opinion on any religious subject. He added that although Washington was "serious and attentive" in church, he never saw him kneel in prayer.

Perhaps these founders should be stricken from mr mcnaughton's painting.