O Great Terrible One
       

The Hindus have it right—Shiva—in one hand you create,
in the other you destroy. Abraham was not surprised when
you asked him to butcher his son. After years of wishing
for this son, he knew his son could be taken away at whim.
(Thanks be to the Circumcision of God's Love. Amen.)
What Sarah knew was that God was hiding in terror of
himself, of us. Even before the angel appeared to stop it all,
to call on the ram, 0 Great Terrible One, with your blurry
eyes, blinded by tears and fear, you started taking back
what you created. You have hated us from the beginning,
and any favors are like crumbs to the starving. How else
am I to understand the child sacrificed by leukemia, the
boy shot down on his way to slide and swing through
childhood, while the shooter lives, is exonerated, and still,
we are here, digging through dirt with broken finger nails.
How do we watch what happens and still live? I wish
you'd turn that hand on yourself, the one aimed for
destruction, this God. Perhaps you do and that is why
sometimes you disappear, blood filling rivers with or
without your absence, nevertheless. I'm not sure why you
keep coming back to us, begging to be begged. 0 Great
Terrible One, I have stopped looking for you in the pews
of synagogues, churches, fields of grass, cliffs. It is in the
voices rising in song, praise or mourning, those voices
which you created and then attempt to quiet. They
continue to sing still. I see you in my neighbor, examining
the death of his grass, or my daughter, flinging her body
in anger because oflaws of nature, because of how little
she knows how to do. You keep flinging yourself back to
us, us your doppelgangers. Like a child, like a disgruntled
landlord. Why don't they do what I want? Why do they
still sing?

With your own answers on our tongues, you send us
manna, and we believe you, such emptiness in our
stomachs that we pretend is bread. But we can taste the
tears inside this feed, this bread of sorrow. We understand
this, the world ages, another young father, mother dies,
cities of mothers, fathers, their children, their
grandparents, burn and smolder. We forget you for a
while. But you keep begging like the panhandlers on the
side of the road, and we believe we created you, that we
are responsible. 0 Great Terrible One, if we are made in
your image, how terrified I am. It is hard not to feed you,
with those blood-rimmed eyes that only the lonely
recognize.

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Copyright © 2018 Leslie Contreras Schwartz All rights reserved
from Nightbloom & Cenote
Saint Julian Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission