What do we do when heaven is not enough,
when it’s not enough to co-create,
love the other, accept the mystery of
differences, sate the senses
with loving life,
and not enough to elate in the laughter
of children, know that after the day
they sleep in peace,
what do we do when we
no longer see a shared humanity,
but adversary, enemy, and think
peace and kindness,
is a form of blindness
just a mirage, some hoax, a spell?
We create hell, when the stuff of
sin invites hate to co-exist with
destruction, when the pain of
hunger and disease weds and
consecrates and consummates
and spreads.
But what if heaven is not a place,
filled with an angelic
empathetic race, clouds and wings,
and saints and harps, and those
we love, but a vibration, some
frequency, some measurable
wave that connects the hearts, the
actual beating, the measured time,
our linear lives, to intertwine,
wholly or in parts, some giving and
receiving between those with a like
light, that reinforces living
and makes sweet our breathing?
It would be picked up like
a radio wave, communicated,
celebrated, sent round the world at
the speed of light,
of thought, of breath, of life.
If you listen, you can hear it,
when heaven is enough for the living
and not something we get after dying,
where satisfaction is sculpted
from the pure experience of
loving, and nothing else in the
history of history
can taste so sweet:
those of us who know,
will know, that heaven is enough, and not
above, but what’s beneath
our feet.
Burt Rashbaum’s publications are Of the Carousel (The Poet’s Press, 2019), and Blue Pedals (Editura Pim, 2015, Bucharest). His poems have appeared in The Antonym, The Seventh Quarry, Storms of the Inland Sea (Shanti Arts Press, 2022), OPUS 300: The Poet’s Press Anthology 1971-2021, and Boats Against the Current.
