Teachers lose patience with kindergarten atheists
Who badger their believing friends,
“But why? Why?”
My feet could not quite touch the floor
From my perch before the principal’s desk
His disapproving look and my baffled father,
what do you mean she’s starting trouble?
Even then my comfort was in things
Observable, repeatable,
And even then my world contained no gods or angels;
I’d never seen the evidence.
Faith was a language as foreign to me
As grief, or Cantonese.
Six years later at my mother’s casket
Too numb to weep,
Glassy eyed,
I left a little spaceship in her hand;
The child who dreamt of flying
Far enough to find her.
A drunken uncle punched my father,
All the women wept–
Wine and cigarettes and then soon after, tears and fists
Are the language of my family’s grief.
Cousin Maurice took me to play chess–
Fifteen years my senior and I whipped him
In a room behind the parlor where the casket lay.
Rook to B2, an unexpected sacrifice that fooled him
Because I spoke chess better than I spoke grief.
Everything is language.
Cancer is a language,
Spoken in hushed tones, in hospital rooms,
In chemical smells and vomit and
Smiles propped on sunken cheeks,
In hollow eyes.
A language that degenerates,
Turns incomprehensible
To a child who only wants to see the stars
a little closer,
And then tell her mother
All about it.
I stopped, then, asking others “why?”
The emptiness I would not name as
“Grief”
Insisted on the presence of my
Mother in the stars,
Infinite, benevolent,
And though I could not find the evidence,
I felt the ache of wanting to believe.
Pictograms are language, comprehensible and elegant,
Expressive and limber
They mean what they say.
I’d learned enough Chinese by twelve to write
A letter to my future self.
And it used the selfsame character
For opportunity and crisis.
I spoke calculus fluently,
And the parlance of the airfield
Where I tested planes and myself to
See how they were wanting.
I would always, always find something wanting.
Flaws, like all good science, are observable, repeatable,
Whether you want them to be so or not.
Faith is a refuge built of air,
And atoms are 99% empty space.
No matter the telescope, you will not find
Its evidence in the stars.
Kindergarten atheists grow up to be
Adult skeptics who clamber up to frozen
Interstellar highways
To escape the mutterings
Of a language they will not call grief.
Flight does not feel gentle when you
Break the speed of sound.
And your body, ever conscious of the volatile, the strange,
The power you control within your very human hands
Feels every little shudder as a threat.
But I speak avionics.
I know the margins of my danger
The unlikeliness of evolution
Leading me to skim the clouds
In a tube, powered by fire.
The soundest science still produces
Levels of uncertainty and even
The tightest ship will sometimes spring a leak.
The observable, repeatable truth is
That no system is perfect
No language is without its flaws
And a pilot can do everything correctly
And still meet a fiery end.
I may not speak the languages of gods and angels
But faith is not so much a stranger as I thought.
I speak aerodynamics and algebra,
All the languages that conjure flight,
But it’s faith that puts me in the cockpit:
Faith in my fluency of overlapping dialects
Of every system ever used to
Birth this point in evolution.
In the fluency of every person down the line
Who touched this plane to make it soar.
So when Jupiter calls, I answer:
Yes, to the breathless press of gravity
The violence of breaking orbit
Yes to the vertigo and the distance and the cold
Yes.
I offer myself proof that I belong to the stars,
No matter if my mother’s not beyond them.
I accept that I deserve to take the chance
To flame across the sky, and pray
(Yes, pray)
That my rocket will not fail,
That my craft may shudder but will not break.
Kindergarten atheist grows up
Half in love with the fragility of life
Speaking faith in ways that sound like disbelief.
I find it strange that now I can look back
Upon the low, persistent sadness
The pills, the sleepless nights, to understand
That I have always spoken grief.