0009 God's New Year Hangover Poem by Michael Shepherd

I’m wondering –
with, I trust, due circumspection
with respect to these holy, mighty matters
yet with the open mind
which He has risked mankind and me with,
whether He keeps a tally
or even an annual journal
of mankind’s cavortings around God’s Christmas…
and how mankind approaches
God’s seasoned, ordained New Year,
His holy, spirited Hogmanay.

Does He receive intelligence,
flights of angels pushing their way -
or unaffected, for who knows? –
through cyberspace, the ether, as it was
and is and ever shall be,
bringing news of how the Good News
went down this year;
the statistics, perhaps, of how many
parents explained this season of infantile blackmail
in the name of metaphoric divine love;
or whether His Christmas message
survived Brussels edicts
and Brussels sprouts

giving Him a clear week
before, in the name of
divine justice and equity,
laws obeyed or disobeyed,
Good and Bad,
Virtue rewarded,
cause and effect,
planning His New Year programme for the world -
a catastrophe here, a well-disguised miracle there –
just to remind mankind of who’s in charge
of those things not covered by your insurance
touchingly referred to without a hint of political correctness
as ‘Acts of God’…(He passed it over to Natural Law..)

Or as some divines assert: powerless,
even He, having set the world upon its course,
its laws – and love, it’s said – in Genesis I ch. I v. I
(and its equivalent of course, in other faiths) ,
to do aught but sit and watch
as the world plays out all this
divine comedy with its silent laughs
like some old film that’s put on
the TV every New Year’s Day;
here We go again, maybe He thinks..

or maybe with a gentle smile
that’s not forgotten the Paradise
of those Who Got What They Wanted
regardless of the cost, (for?) at Christmas;
the Hell of New Year’s Eve;
the Purgatory of a hangover;

or maybe He’s laughing fit to burst – they say
He got the Dawkins book on Christmas Day.