Sixty-Six, Alone, No God

(after a line from "Forty-One, Alone, No Gerbil" by Sharon Olds)

"In the strange quiet, I realize"
Why I now seldom hear from my old intimate:
Fear of my incipient atheism and
Hard jeremiads read at church
Have prompted a hailmary email
In the mistaken belief that Bible bells will break the spell
And call me back from this far country,
This Beaujolais Nouveau of my godless youth,
Whose music is stronger spirit now in my dotage
Than my thirty year fast on a pilgrimage
Where everything godly I professed and
Solemnly vowed to live for and die for
(And learned how to lie to myself for)
Turned out to be only simulated flight,
A long sky dive into the sinkhole of a footnote,
A mere ellipsis…three dots (one for each decade?)
A period
Of ignorant bliss
Almost microscopic next to the
Bold characters that spell out
The statement of what I was doing
When the kingdom came…
(What was I doing?
Oh, yes , singing.)

I can bear –no, I enjoy–
Being without my old Imaginary Friend,
But the silence of old real friends
Is a new blues as hard to sing
As it is easy to understand.