Dear God of Childhood

Where did you go?
Here one moment,
gone the next.
You dropped us off at adult practice
and said you’d be right back
but we haven’t seen you since.
All these years later
We hold on to some hope
that maybe you’re just stuck in traffic.
Maybe you’re lost at the grocery store.
Maybe your banging the neighbor.

Dear God of Childhood
I get it.
You want worshippers
with more vitality
than what we of the middle-aged possess.
You forsake us
for worshippers
who barely comprehend your existence.
A flock that can barely understand
the devastation of your absence.

Dear God of Childhood
Your absence is marked with
My first dead friend.
She scratched her arm with poppies
and didn’t wake up.
I wasn’t a kid by then.
I knew about death but
I didn’t know he moved in so close.

I don’t understand exactly what happened.
I can say that
when we were younger
and we had an owie or a booboo,
a kiss is all it would take to make it better.

She didn’t have any owies or booboos
on the outside.
But all of the boys wanted to kiss her anyway,

to make it better.
Some of the boys kissed her too hard.
Some of the boys kissed her with bruises.
Some of the boys kissed her so much
she had to find a new way to worship you.

I am ashamed to admit
that when I first saw the track marks on her arms
I was envious that I
could never be as devout
in my worship of you.

Dear God of Childhood I go to the meetings every week or so and we sit there and say the prayers ‘god grant me the serenity god grant me the serenity god grant me the serenity,’ but we still have your name on our lips and that only makes us more thirsty my throat is so dry it you could start a fire some of the new guys shake and you might call it the tremors and you might call it the DTs but I call it an exorcism they’re trying to pull a beast out through their mouths and drown it in endless shit coffee and what can we do when all that we have is all of these bones bones bones and all of this flesh and all of it is halfway dirt.

Dear God of Childhood
We are a congregation that denies ourselves communion.
I’d like to think that makes us more holy.
But I suspect it makes us less.

Amen.