Christian culture’s crucifixation
nails us to our seats as, station by station,
we travel the trammelled line
until we find
that terminal
more primal.

The humanstrain’s end-of-line stop
is Ragnarok.
Everyone please disembark
into the dark–
no light, no map.
Mind the Ginnungagap.

*****

This is as close as I get to religion: existential uncertainty. I’m a Militant Agnostic: “I don’t know… and neither do you!” Yet this attitude is apparently compatible with religion, being not that different from Eliot’s ‘East Coker‘:
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters
(…)
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.
But Christianity? I think not. Altogether too unlikely, with so many impossibilities packed into such a small understanding of the cosmos. We don’t know where we are headed, not just as individuals with finite lives, but as a species that is simultaneously developing space travel and genetic modifications… the possibilities are endless and the future, dark as well as light, is unknowable.

The poem is semi-formal with its loose iambics and paired rhymes or slant rhymes, but no structure beyond its natural flow. It was originally published in the Experimental section of a 2019 issue of Better Than Starbucks, and republished as part of work being spotlighted in The HyperTexts in August 2024.

Photo: “London Holborn tube station in Black and White effect” by Patrick Cannon Tax Barrister is licensed under CC BY 2.0.