March 2, 2007

In the Cardinal's Closet

It is time for Friday Satire, and what I offer is satirical but of a rather mordant sort. This poem came to me in the wee hours of this morning, and I pass it along as something delivered from an unknown sender. For those of you who enjoy my poems, and those who despise them, you will not be disappointed.
In the Cardinal’s Closet

In the cardinal’s closet
the ghosts of former altar boys
play tiddly-winks with
consecrated hosts.
Drunk on sacramental wine, they
suffer the manual acts of
paunchy gray-haired clerics,
grasping vainly for the
tatters of their own lost youth,
ultimately unable to confect
a transubstantiation of their lives.

O wounded, wounding world,
when will you cease
this cycle of abuse?
Your temples, shaken to the depths,
stand empty, gaping, void of spirit;
you have exorcised your angels,
and expelled your Lord.

How I have longed, Jerusalem,
to shield you with my wings.
But this is not Jerusalem,
this Babylon. Come out, come out
from her my people. Fallen, fallen
is Babylon the great.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
March 2, 2006

1 comment:

  1. June ButlerMarch 03, 2007

    Tobias, I do like your poems, but I don't know if I'd call this one satire. It's trenchant, all right; the metaphors bite. It seems quite serious to me.

    But it's your poem. Who could explicate it better than you?

    ReplyDelete

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