To All Atheists Poem by John Lars Zwerenz

TO ALL ATHEISTS

You who gamble away
Your Elysian inheritance
By thinking that heaven will not be
Are assassins of your eternal day,
Yielding acquiescence
To your passing pleasures' remedy:
That specious ghost,
This world as host
Which swallows you whole -
Body and soul!
Tell me, o atheist,
For I challenge your best! -
Where are the wines
That do not wither
On Rome's ephemeral vines,
Now there, now hither? -
I tell you they are gleaming
In a sun that forever shines
As a brook, which streaming,
Never runs to an end: a wine which never dries!
It inebriates and vivifies.
This sacred liquor, this wine, it sighs,
Ever flowing to the turquoise skies,
Like the diamond, regal fountains
Found in His majestic Courts of light,
Surrounded by marble statues and mountains -
Devoid of sorrow, devoid of night!
And these mellifluous lavenders, these rivulets
Are proofs which reveal your soliloquies as lies.
Death to your taverns and multi colored bars,
Filled with customary gigolos and coy coquettes! -
For your fate was to be among the stars.
Or do you require an argument more refined,
Than such an allusion to what is dead in your mind?
Then tell me, o atheist,
For I challenge your best! -
Is the tree merely reborn, then unleaved? -
Or was there a first oak that grieved,
Watching Adam stupidly spill the wine? -
For where and how did our race originate? -
Out of the chilled, vaporous stars, bereft of all design?
Where was the ovum first conceived
Which breeds your arrogance, your pride, your hate?
O where o where did each star come from? -
And Who created every orb which gleams? -
You obtuse, loathsome, faithless ones,
Provocateurs of wars, poverty, sickness and strife!
I tell you that it was not merely some,
But all of those suns
Where not spawn from dreams: -
An infinite power made them and your life!
And you still give this write
A disdainful look.
Yet what I have said
Here in your sight
Is confirmed in every physics book! -
And just as your wrongs are never right,
You will still deny this verse of light,
For you are swallowed by the graven brine
Of your own metallic, worldly wine.
You refuse to change, to pray, to think,
Clutching to the cacophony of your own drunken din,
Where the drinkers rejoice in drink,
And the sinners rejoice in sin.

John Lars Zwerenz