My mother, very Catholic, loves that song: Imagine
there’s no heaven. Can you picture it?—my mother
joining the chorus of her three churchless children to croon,
no heaven, no hell, nothing before or after? Above us,
only the universe and its borderless yawn. Only the trees
who died for my handwriting, history’s pollen, fields
and field hands I can’t stop robbing with money.
Today, I woke up on still-stolen land, then scrolled
through the latest debris of people attempting godliness
in a hundred wrong ways. The room was filled today
with light; filled, you could say, with nothing. No hope,
no glory. No such peach as an ethical peach.
The minute I started wanting paradise, it leapt
from my belief. I’m not good enough to survive
not being good. I’m like you—still drooling
after a perfect world, even as the stars warble
off-key and the oceans rattle with plastics.
Imagine, I can’t stop saying. Imagine, I beg,
when I should have said, Look: Paradise
is both a particle and a wave. You don’t have
to believe in something for it to startle you awake.