Reflections from Middle Age

Beware the pious
Wrapped smugly in their hard-edged worlds
With ancient words of steel that crack like thunder
On an open field.
Enrobed with suspicious glare
They march around the borders of minds
They’ve furrowed dry and bare
Wary for ideas buried there

Beware the pious
who control your mind
Wrap you up in culture
Teach you to be unkind
Or worse
Static.
Still.

For the river that does not flow
grows dank and dirty –
festering in its own excrement.
And the mind that fixates on a single point of view
Hardens in its certainty.
Like concrete,
Ugly, stuck and dead
Devoid of meaning
Of love
Of life
Of God.

So beware the pious who invoke ancient rules
with no room for love.
Who make war on the creative spirit,
that is the voice of your better self,
with holy scriptures stuck in time.
Unyielding.
Used out of place to stir up disgrace.

Oh beware, beware
Those who claim to know the mind of God
Who demand your unquestioning silence
With threats of violence
And your oath
Of blind fealty

For they care not for you.

Beware the pious with their myopic gaze
Who’ve never looked up with wonder at the moon
Or stretched their minds into the vast caverns of space
Which throws shadows on conviction.
For they would sacrifice your future on the pyres of a past
They cling to with necromantic fingers,
And braid your fears into blindness.

Beware the pious who police
your food,
your clothes,
your body,
your opinions,
your mood.
Your soul
Which thirsts, with deep desire,
To dream, to seek, to expand
And dare take flight
beyond the confines of cult and slight.
Your soul which shimmers with the glimmer of love
Like a naked body, touched by the whisper of winter air
On an autumnal evening,
And is moved
By art
And music
And a sky full of stars.

Beware the pious.
They care not for you.
They speak not for you.
They would destroy you to protect their own desires.
And claim the glory for a God of their own imagining.

Sharlene Zeederberg April 2016