! ! Godliness Poem by Michael Shepherd

Riffling through the dictionary
of the mind - or, as the Anglo-Saxons
named it, ‘word-hoard’ -
for a word that exactly matches
what needs to be said,

a word may call out from the page
like that kitten or that puppy
in the pet-shop, which devastatingly
looks you straight in the eye and mutely says
‘Master, treasure me…’

so, the other day, ‘godly’ called to me: as
abbreviated in former times from ‘godlike’;

not a word to suit, say, those fine-minded Hindu pundits
who would want to classify its degrees
of nearness or of distance from the state
of god or gods..

rather, a gentle, misty, English-weather, modest-shining word
which – borrowing a trick from those same
Hindu grammarians – is neither limited, nor unlimited;
or alternatively: is both limited, and unlimited;
allows for small-g god, or big-G God;
allows for frequent changes in the weather;
and thus, will halt at all the stations on the line…

so, stopped in the street by
some presumptuous well-intentioned stranger
with that piercing eye that stoppeth one of three,
enquiring ‘Have you been saved by Jesus yet? ’
we may reply as if we were Dr Johnson
of quirky diction and of his own Dictionary fame,

replying, ‘Sir, my mind has godly inclinations…’

Yes, I’m comfortable with ‘godly’: like
that kitten or that puppy, asking
no more of you than what
shared nature with a smile
feeds and loves..