Morality Without God

I’ve seen the lights from a thousand stars,

and the flames of a thousand pairs of eyes

and their glow is the same mercurial fire,

intense as lasers or

the gold in the eyes of a gorilla,

the bright stare of an angry lion,

the very center of a new flower

that’s alone in a field of dust,

awaiting the center of another’s,

and I see into time’s cauldron

pieces of a truth, like moats in the sunlight,

separate but whole, the management of life

to which we assign our symbols and our sounds

that bring us bread and sometimes love,

sometimes sadness, sometimes bliss,

and the lexicon fills up,

overflowing with desire for sounds

to make it all come out right

and pleasant in our dreams.

We stand on a cliff, wind in our faces,

the dark sea below, rocks and raging seas awaiting,

we offer up our words as if for shields

against the truth of living,

while coursing through our veins

our history boils and tumbles

leaving us sublimely alone,

and yet arguing with false angles

that we stand not beside some god

who cares much less for the thistle

than he does for a deadly human wound,

and cares more for the blood of a saint

than he does for sigh of a deranged child.

Finally, as the sea roars and the winds

tear us from one terrible moment to the next,

we arrive at the corner of a dark street

and meet ourselves coming toward us,

head bent in the anguish of life,

and there, in an explosion of untellable truth

we see that gods vanish on the pavement

like evaporating rain in the morning light,

and our minds turn inward like a vast mirror,

larger than the most imaginable universe.

We the humans who have made the word,

we the creatures who create the lust for knowing

what lies behind the mind of knowing,

we the animal flesh conspiring to be more

than the passions of animals,

have arrived at the Eden of moral certainty,

and stand before it dumbfounded and blind.

Far off, a billion, billion light years away,

the sanctity of an  illumination

that makes us curl up in fetal sleep,

closes a hand around our minds,

and in the end

we know what knowing really is.