Max Gosh don't know if I have had a civilised conversation with a Mormon
-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Max Richards
Sent: 09 October 2013 02:51
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: 'My Mormon'
My Mormon
The seat by the window was filled
with a senior American of large build.
Another on the aisle slowly stood aside
while I squeezed past and in. A long ride
San Francisco to Boston lay ahead -
cabin staff would keep us watered but not fed.
We all had stuff to read:
a crime novel on my left, me indeed
Tolstoy on Kindle full of typos and freshness - 'The Cossacks and 'Family
Happiness';
By the window a newsprint weekly
all about faith service and Salt Lake City.
We clenched for take-off, made survey
of the hilly city and the wide flat bay,
turned inland towards the rising sun.
We seniors dozed off one by one.
Stirring I saw my Mormon had woken.
He said we're already over Michigan.
Then told me how good the hunting was
last weekend with his Utah sons.
Deer hunters are conservationists
stabilising the numbers of these noble pests.
I might have said how Tolstoy's men
first missed a boar but got a Chechen
or was it a Tartar? I get confused.
My Mormon mentioned his family pride -
on both sides ancestors trekked west
from intolerance through great peril to blest
Utah and the flourishing of their faith.
We both liked separation of church and state.
Both deplored the power of priests, with hope for reforms from the Latin
American Pope.
Religions are good while they stick to Love without dogmas handed down from
above.
I said I was reading how hard it was
when Lutherans met Aborigines.
They wanted to respect the Aranda
and bring them in onto the verandah,
school their kids and teach them hymns - and cover their disconcerting
limbs,
and lock the schoolgirls up at night.
Learning their language to translate
the Gospels showed the pastors
Aranda knew eternity from the stars,
divine powers everywhere.
My Mormon thought time will show
religions all have judeo-christian
foundations, dispersed by migration
to the ends of the earth. I should ask
my anthropologist friend how that task
of research was proceeding. We saw
a Great Lake but not Niagara;
some upstate New York wildernesses,
the golf courses of Massachusetts,
Boston's Puritan foundations overlaid
with tribal ways and faiths less staid.
I used to teach 'The Scarlet Letter'.
America now mostly knows better
and doesn't need my doggerel
to distinguish natives from the devil.
My Mormon dreams of a holiday trip
in the South Pacific, letting rip
on the long journey out
amongst New Zealand's deer and trout
and basking homeward-bound in Sydney
pleasures and multicultural Hawaii.
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