Godless Poets Good and Bad
by Franco Bertucci
I admire godless poets who face the abyss with good sportsmanship. If I were godless I am not sure I would be so brave. I would be one of the angry, bitter poets who deride us hopeful sheep. I might not be so good a sport.
The poets who don't believe and still manage to be good are examples to me. I admire them. But I grieve for them. Their stuff is so impossibly sad. Believers suffer. Believers descend into dark pits of anguish. But believers know there is some sliver of a chance they will come out again. They see at times that the odds don't look good- but they hope.
Godless poets, on the other hand, know they are doomed. The good ones take this knowledge on the chin and their stuff is beautiful, if tragic. They make one want to drink one's fill of nature's cup and then die young and be buried in a homemade pine casket next to an earthly lover covered by ferns and weeping vines. And that is ok, in moderation. But the bad godless poets make one want to commit suicide. And that makes me angry.
When the good godless poets go to heaven, they are going to be surprised. The wisps of beauty they knew and spent their talent on were but fleeting glimpses of a solid heaven through a shaving mirror. Their consuming passions were weak kitten longings, obliterated and replaced by the real thing during their first milisecond in eternity.
When the bad godless poets go to hell it will be just like their poetry.
Poems and other things. ©2010 Franco Bertucci - Donate to the awkward cause