Afghan Drone Attack--The Road to Elsewhere

Are you feeling like Vonnegut after the debacle'd news of the last few months?
Here's a poem by me to chew on:

The Road to Elsewhere

Gehenna…
The highway to ‘hail,
Hail Afghans all here,’

(“Give me your ears…”)
Is paved with good intentions and ‘IUO’s.’
On that yellow ‘book’ road, quran
Tell tales-where-banned
Men of lairs acclaim allah’s offense…

Come out of your pious lores, you liars.
But over here, we’re First,
We’re all so right, “god’s man”
Christ-ones
Of the west wind

Our shocked awe amazes
18 years of twistered god-centered war
“only a little more…”
every precedence tells,
rankly wrong
(“You, too …’brutal’?”)

We’re not in Kansas
No more, morals, nor never were. Was?
A last ‘stand’ stammering
In that season—us dogs of Mars and a sheep’s head,
Let’s make pieces with the Muslims,
More mothers slump to that deserted bleeding ground.*
Balmed for All...

Uh…
Can't we humans get a heart?
--

Work for peace,
Dan Wilcox
First pub. Fish Food magazine

Part #2: Thoughts on Ernest Hemingway and King David

On Visiting Hemingway’s Mansion

Next to the mansion Pauline’s money bought
Where Hemingway wrote
Timeless stories
Of skill
And luck
And Nothing…

Next to this blocked hard beauty
Of coral rock,
Survivor of hurricanes
Their dissolute lives
Of lust and liquor
And divorce…

Next to the survivors, the 54 cats
Including the 6-toed ones
And a 150-year-old Banyan tree…

Stand the Key West lighthouse and the mortuary.

Light and death…
Suicide at 61
Hemingway spoke of writing one true sentence.
Why not live one true life?


by Daniel Wilcox

First pub. in The Rogue Review
Also in Leaf Garden and Psalms, Yawps, and Howls

--


Partially Found Poem Lost*
*Created from an old review by Anthony Burgess
of Ernest Hemingway and His World
by Jack Beatty in The New Republic October 7, 1978

The Bull-thrower Hemingway touches up
His life to match his legend’s ‘fancifications,’
Combining the charming with family tragic
Compulsive aficionado of the braggart
Early photo shot of an ample youth
Clutching a dead bird in one hand
And holding a large thick phallus
Of a gun with the other; later
He basked and boasted of past
Wives and bulls figured in
Most of the pictures filled
With nerves and muscles
Instead of head and heart
Growing gloom, failing
To be his own tall myth
Pressure without grace
Too godlike to cope
A reason to despair
Caught in a terrible
Repetition from
Key West to
Self-death
Bad end
Lie


Gathered into poetic form by
Daniel Wilcox

First pub. in The Houston Literary Review,
also in Psalms, Yawps, and Howls
--




"And when [God] had removed [Saul], he raised up David to be their king, of whom he testified and said, ‘I have found in David the son of Jesse a man after my heart, who will do all my will.’
Acts 13:22

After His Own Bloody Heart?

Like David when he killed for that Philistine king,
That former shepherd boy with his sling and stone,
Who had slaughtered and beheaded Goliath,

Now turned slaying brigand for Goliath’s nation;
So with a raider’s heart and savage sword,
God’s man assassinates 200 men fore- (their hidden) skin
Only so to wed into Saul’s royal line, loveless using,
Then abandoning his saving wife Michel for other women,
What a slew!

And this Godly marauder sallies forth from
Zitlag stringing a brazen deception,
Not a psalmed lyre; yes, a liar,
‘preying’ on others to execute,
Massacring every man, woman, and infant--

Hear the death ‘rattle’?

Palming other’s possessions, not psalming

Stripping the bleeding dead for precious loot,
Plundering towns, dark gashes of bandit smoke,
Gehenna
Oh the Hebrew off-angled gulag…
“Precious not is the over flow”

No truth shedding and bloody
Hellish, David living as Goliath—

Sheol
Not
Selah

*27 “David arose and went, along with his men, and killed two hundred of the Philistines. And David brought their foreskins, which were given in full number to the king, that he might become the king’s son-in-law. And Saul gave him his daughter Michal for a wife. 28 …Yahweh was with David, and that Michal, Saul’s daughter, loved him.
1 Samuel 18: 26-28

*Hymn ”Nothing But the Blood of Jesus”
* “Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” Hebrews 9:22 ESV


By Daniel Wilcox
--


But thank Goodness, there is good news to counter all of the horror, tragedy, sorrow, cruelty, and absurdity...


In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Heaven and Hell

The Beginning and the End, the Ancient of Days, the Satan, the Height and the Depth, Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, the Sheep versus the Goats, the Third and Seventh Heavens, the Heavens of the Heavens, the New Jerusalem, the Wedding Supper of the Lamb, the Alpha and Omega--what do all these eschatological words mean?

I've got the theological tomes The Flame that Consumes, The Dogma of Hell, The Sovereignty of God, Heaven, on and on, but here I am at 62 full of endless head notions theorized by countless theologians who've never been to either Heaven or Hell, so I am not going to regurgitate their speculations, at least not yet.

Instead, let's dive into Jesus' vivid imaged words. And remember, Jesus speaks in symbols, metaphors, and hyperbole. He is mainly concerned with our motives and actions of goodness, not how theologically, doctrinally correct we might be. After all the Scribes, knew the Bible better than any living humans yet they failed to live loving lives.

Also, let's try to forget everything we've heard or read about the End of Things. Too often people take Jesus literally and thus miss his message altogether. Too often the Good News Jesus came to declare and give to all has become bad news of the worst sort, even downright evil.

Matthew 5:29-30: "And if your right eye causes you to sin," Jesus says, "gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into Gehenna."

One extreme statement of Jesus' many extremist statements. But what does it mean? The first point to see, based on an understanding of Jewish imagery is that Jesus is not talking literally. Beside, no disciple in the New Testament is ever spoken of having actually gouged out his eye or cut off his hand.

If Jesus is not speaking in prose, not in legal terms, then what is the message?

And what is Gehenna?

What ever Jesus is saying, it can't be what a lot of religious people (Christians and Muslims) mean when they speak of God hating sinners and destining them to Hell. Many Christian and Muslim leaders even claim that God preordained most humans to eternal damnation before the beginning of Time!

But in the same section of Scripture as Jesus' Gehenna statement, Jesus says we are to love our enemies like God loves all humans, that indeed to love others is the way toward perfection:
"I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you in order that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he causes his son to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteoous...Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect."

Yes, God loves us deeply, limitlessly and is not willing that any individual should perish (11 Peter 3:9).

But what of Hell then? What is Gehenna for if not for humans as the Catholics and Reformers, and Muslims, and other claim?

First, Jesus' words in Matthew 25:41 say "the eternal fire" was prepared for the eternal destruction of evil (the devil and his messengers). And later in the New Testament, it says"the Lake of Fire" was prepared for the destruction of Death!

So why then does Jesus speak of individuals who don't help the poor and the hungry and the persecuted as being told to "depart" into the eternal fire?

Because when humans refuse goodness, even embrace evil, they identify with evil. And evil is bound for destruction if there is any justice in the Cosmos.

Another way of perceiving this is the outlook of Eastern Orthodox theology which emphasizes that God (like Scripture says) is a "consuming fire." The Orthodox church says God is the fire of eternal love which purifies and redeems all who willingly live in love.

In contrast humans who focus on, live in, selfishness, greed, lust, hate, and revenge--are consumed by those evil actions and cannot experience God's love as purifying because they refuse to love the truth.

Also, keep in mind none of this is literal! How could Death be thrown into Hell? That doesn't make any rational sense; it's not a factual statement of prose, of science. We are speaking here of spiritual truth in the language of metaphor and imagery.

But even beyond this, some followers of Jesus (such as Origen, C. S. Lewis, William Barclay, Keith Ward, etc.) have deep hope that since God is perfect love, that God will never give up on even the most evil-choosing humans, the ones utterly given to the seven deadly acts of depravity. Hopefully, at some distant point in eternity, even the most rebellious and reprehensible will come finally to the truth and be saved.


Let us look briefly into this term Gehenna.

To be continued

In the Light of God,
Daniel Wilcox