Robert Ludden Poet Free verse

To My Fundamentalist Son

The signposts come along much faster, now.
And I fear most of all not my own death
or even your own sense of loss or grief,
but my betrayal, for I cannot go
upon the road to everlasting life
that you will travel, reaching for my hand
and at the close releasing it as I
release your paper lord--and then I die 
without your blest assurance 
that I made him mine.

You cannot understand the god I breathe,
the one who breathes in me also-- the one
who holds his peace and thus enables me
in dying, to inflict more pain, for if
I make an honest life and then in death
deceive, I do not pull away your prayers
but neither do I then impart the love
I hold within my chest.  For I do not
beneath this tent address your god or your
devotion; and thus become for you 
the merest husk to blow away.

How may I speak to you of mystery?
How may I share with you 
a cosmos that embraces all--a love unstoppable?
If I could creep with you upon my knees
into a throne room in the stratosphere
that our old fathers fabricated in
their heads, then I would plead that you 
perceive a later portrait of 
transcendence.

Then will you let me grieve with you 
that you must grieve eternal loss?
(while in my heart I know with your 
same certainty the opposite is true)
--That I remove the father of 
the lord we love, as I suffuse a 
deity beneath that canopy of truth. 
I might explain forever what I know 
of that supreme and drowning ocean, 
overwhelming fear--but knowing inwardly,  
it is what you may never see.

You own a most capricious source
of immortality.  Of after life,. I do not doubt, 
but see it  through another spirit lens
that you have spurned, as I in turn
have laid your own aside.
There is double dying as the price
for glad reunion, and for one of us
in--creed-able surprise.
                  ~

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