Religious Instruction Poem by Mina Loy

Religious Instruction



This misalliance
follows the custom
for female children
To adhere to maternal practices

While the atheist father presides over
the prattle of the churchgoer
with ironical commentary from his arm-chair

But by whichever
religious route
to brute
reality
our forebears speed us

There is often a pair
of idle adult
accomplices in duplicity
to impose upon their brood

an assumed acceptance
of the grace of God
defamed as human megalomania

seeding the Testament
with inconcievable chastisement

and of Christ
who
come with his light
of toilless lilies
To say "fear
not it is I"
wanting us to be fearful

He who bowed the ocean tossed
with holy feet
which supposedly dead

are suspended over head
neat-
ly crossed in anguish
wounded with red
varnish

From these
slow-drying bloods of mysticism
mysteriously
the something-soul emerges
miserably

and instinct (of economy)
in every race
for reconstructing debris
has planted an avenging face
in outer darkness

. . .

The lonely peering eye
of humanity
looked into the Néant
and turned away

. . .

Ova's consciousness
impulsive to commit itself to justice
—to arise and walk
its innate straight way
out of the
accidence of circumstance—

collects the levitate chattels
of its will and makes for the
magnetic horizon of liberty
with the soul's foreverlasting
opposition
to disintegration

So this child of Exodus
with her heritage of emigration
often
"sets out to seek her fortune"
in her turn
trusting to terms of literature
dodging the breeders' determination
not to return "entities sent on consignment"
by their maker Nature
except in a condition
of moral
effacement

Lest Paul and Peter
never
notice the creatures
ever had had Fathers
and Mothers

They were disgraced in their duty
should such spirits
take an express passage
through the family bodies
to arrive at Eternity
as lovely as they originally
promised

So on whatever days
she chose to "run away"
the very
street corners of Kilburn
close in upon Ova
to deliver her
into the hands of her procreators

Oracle of civilization
‘Thou shalt not live by dreams alone
but by every discomfort
that proceedeth out of
legislation'

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