Agnostic Revisited Poem by Carey Lenehan

I looked for it in Church, this thing they call Faith.
The arches were pretty, the air was still
but in the dusty gloom
of all those criss-crossed chantrys,
I found only
dust and crumpled petals of
other people's belief.

I searched for it in school, during many hours of
mindnumbing recital,
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus Deuteronomy, Numbers......
As if it mattered,
which order they came in, for the sense
to me was always missing.

I learned a tale, a pretty fable,
of fishes and loaves,
heroic escapades and blessed passovers,
told daily that
this was the God of me, the one true faith, superior,
in form and style, to all others
Church of England,
King James and his jolly bible.
A history of the world according to whom?

Today I learned another Genesis, another creation,
similar to my own, but different....
four thousand years different
other Gods, other times, other faiths....
same story.
So tell me Mr Fisher, Religious Education Teacher,
bald and boring,
which story did you teach me?

Was it truth we sought on dry afternoons
with Genesis
and Exodus?
Was it God, or Yahweh, that saved Moses
from the wrath of the pharoahs he cheated?
Did the secrets of Solomon come,
not from God, but from Sumer,
from the Seat of Life?
From the silty mouth of the Tigris and the lush
Euphrates fruit bowl, from the land of oil,
and war?

Here lie the tablets of a different history,
before the legends
of Christ, these other origins of Darwin,
in the time of Heroes,
the clash of the Titans,
here where Mohammad and Jacob are forever opposed
beneath the eye of Horus, the valley of gold
in the fields of the Nefilim, under the light
of a true Creator,
here lies a bible submerged in mud,
buried by the flood
and the faith you imposed.

Mr Fisher. You should have looked further than the end of King James