Poem: Letter to God

Ethan Goffman

Dear God,

This letter isn’t really to or about you,

but about myself, since I can’t conceive

who or what or if you are.

Although maybe it’s about

trying to find myself through finding you,

or find you through finding myself,

or lose myself through finding you,

or, although I think this the least likely,

losing you through finding myself.

All I can say is

I tried pretty hard in this life,

though probably not hard enough,

did better than I expected or have a right to,

didn’t hurt anyone too badly

or at least not as badly as others hurt me.

Is it all about love, as the poets say,

Or is it the mystics who say that, or the theologians or philosophers?

Maybe it’s just the Beatles who say that?

In any case, I do love

my wife and my cat.

Perhaps I love myself more,

although I hate myself

a little bit each day.

God, do you mind if I address you

by your proper name.

Like Madonna or Beyonce or Cher,

you use only

that one appellation.

Not John Q. God or Janie Deity,

but Yahweh or Allah or Jesus,

perhaps Brahma or Buddha 

or any of a hundred thousand names

all meaning the same infinite,

the inexpressible,

all

inadequate

yet strangely

sufficient.

Your name is blotted out,

partially and intermittently, by

those who fear saying the unsayable,

reducing you to G-d or YHWH

(how strange to fear speaking the name

of that entity said to have birthed us,

to love us)

(how strange that this entity so often strikes terror).

I confess,

after 60 years on this planet,

I still have no idea

who or what the hell you are

(sorry for the curse—please don’t strike me dead!)

or what might constitute you

or you might constitute

or why we exist

or whether we’re, perhaps, just an illusion,

a god delusion.

Still, here we are,

we are here,

here are we,

we think therefore we be.

Our consciousness trickles,

meanders, bounces,

the hard problem,

each fleeting thought part of a puzzle,

without a solution.

Perhaps to solve it would make

existence

meaningless.

So I curl up with my wife and cat

and a good book that fails to explain

the meaning of it all.

Walking across me, the cat

leaps suddenly

scratching me with her back claws,

blissfully unaware of the pain she’s caused.

 

My wife had a spat of anger

earlier today

when I failed to pick up

her favorite yoghurt.

The one you love

always hurts you.

Twenty years old, the cat

pees in corners

saturating our house.

Is it the smell of love?

I await with dread

the death of

the cat,

perhaps of my wife, 

who suffers unexplained

heart palpitations,

eventually,

my own,

although when that happens

I may be blissfully

unaware.

Dear God

(and I mean the phrase “Dear God”

as a compliment and a curse),

It is futile to beg you to reveal all.

Almost certainly, it’s best that I don’t know.

After all,

the multitude of priests, imams, rabis, ministers,

mystics, atheists, psychics,

who claim to understand the clues left in documents,

written by humans, perhaps divinely inspired, here and there,

or the chemists, biologists, physicists, 

who struggle to decipher

the clues left by light and water and fossil records,

who claim to begin to understand

evolution, the big bang, quarks, the Higgs bosun particle, dark matter,

the multiverse . . . 

know no more than I do.

---

Setu, March 2023