Humanist Voices in Verse:

This week’s poem is by HNN’s Poetry Editor Daniel Thomas Moran.

Daniel Thomas Moran served as Poet Laureate of Suffolk County, New York from 2005 to 2007. His work has appeared in The New York Times, National Forum, and the Poetry Salzburg Review. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor at Boston University’s School of Dental Medicine. His website is www.danielthomasmoran.net.

If you’d like to contribute original poetry to Humanist Voices in Verse, write to hnn@americanhumanist.org with “Poetry” in the subject line.

Please send no more than three poems for consideration per week.

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God

He is the beginning,
and the end.
The bearer of all forevers.
His finger tips
swirl galaxies.
His eye sees
the very codes of life.
With his mercy
He brought forth
purgatory, and
men with two cheeks.
In His wisdom,
He wished a deluge
upon the Earth,
and fashioned Darwin
from the muck.
He is more
than we dare know,
and yet less,
than we can imagine.
He made tinmen and popes.
Black holes and the aurora borealis.
He is love and
love is blind.
He loves a good fight.
He enjoys His fame.
He had me fail geometry and
made trees which became
the masts of ships and
the bunks in the death camps.
He conceived of
hummingbirds and nuclear physics.
He is indeed most righteous.
In His firmament
evil never triumphs.
He makes
plaster madonnas weep and
causes deserts and cancer and
snowflakes and stillbirths and
fireflies and widows and
shadows and the apocalypse.
He knows
everyone by name.
He listens to prayers.
He is the landlord
the taxman and the concierge.
He is surely one
of us.

—Daniel Thomas Moran