Hagiographies In Our Current Political Environment
We mint our saints in neon now,
Their cheekbones cut from screens and static,
Golden calves with fiber-optic veins,
Hoofed in convenience and applause.
They learn to glow before they live,
Learn to bleed without a wound.
Once, holiness arrived on fire—
A thorned voice cracking the ceiling of the skull.
Now it trickles through notifications,
Thin as milk diluted with promotion.
Even martyrs have brand managers.
Even wounds wear makeup.
I kneel before the altar of updates,
My thumbs in constant prayer,
Scrolling for a sign that still has teeth.
Every miracle is sponsored.
Every resurrection comes with terms,
Small print stitched into the shroud.
The dead are louder than the living.
We canonize in real time—
A tragedy, a candle, a trending hymn,
Then on to the next immaculate disaster.
Grief has learned to multitask.
Ash is archived.
Our saints no longer starve in deserts—
They starve in crowded rooms,
Feed on echoes, likes, the clean white crack
Of being witnessed without being known.
Their halos flicker in algorithmic weather,
Shorted by irrelevance.
I want the old ferocity back—
The kind that sears a name into bone,
That does not vanish after thirty days
Like an unrenewed subscription to sorrow.
I want a holiness that indicts me,
Not the soft-focus mercy of forgetting.
We write our sacred lives in disappearing ink,
Hagiographies that refresh and vanish—
Lives reduced to captions under flame.
We are all relics in plastic cases,
Handled without touch,
Venerated without trembling.
And God—if you are still here—
You must be exhausted by our mirrors,
By this choir of self-lit saints
Singing through glass.
Even you, I think, would crave
One unrecorded miracle.
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