There’s no comfort for me in being told
That I’m a loving creation of a benevolent mind
Or that the world was built
For the likes of us.
The messy wildness
Of life
The pain and the inequality and the accidents
The beauty and the weirdness
These things make far more sense to me as chaos and chance.
I think we were the ones who sculpted the deities we needed
Taking collective life-giving clay
And glazing it with our own tears
Creating translucent figures
To stand beside us in the tangles.
Queen of the dead
Lord of war
Mx trickster
God of storms
Goddess of love
Mother Earth.
Immortal ones
Cast from the mud to which we return
Containing the bones of our ancestors
And the blood of our children
And waiting to take us back again.
Bottom up deities
Wrought from the mess
To rule over the themes that trouble us
Making more-than-human people to lean on
To pray to
To hold us
To help us cope with the ever changing strangeness of being alive
And dying
Over and over and over again.
