With apologies to William Blake and James Tate
Things got bonkers after the election. The church fired me at the Annual Meeting then requested a closing prayer. The vote hadn’t been close. I removed my collar. This was going to be harder than it looked. I could give a veiled sermon on René Girard’s scapegoat mechanism, but that was last week’s prayer. The Moderator handed me the microphone.
“Could you pray us out, Pastor?” People looked hungry for closure then lunch. Tyger, tyger, burning bright, I intoned, trying to remember the rest of the poem I’d learned in Mr. McKenna’s class. He loved to call on me when my head was down, shrinking into my desk. Like then, the stakes seemed both urgent and utterly forgettable.
