God is in the Ground

You’re praying in the wrong direction, friend, look around.

You must have figured out that God is in the ground.

What happens in the sky but hiccups

Of light and water?

Nothing deliberate, nothing divine,

No.

God is nestled at the molten core, working out and upward,

Saturating a domain of mud and ash and metal

and the blessed ranks of the living and the dead,

the burrowers and the buried, lapis lazuli and sparrow bones.

He works not with cold clouds but at the solid, clanging forge at the center of all,

shifting his shoulders to the beat from the speakers you rest on the sidewalk. Red with benign mega-centigrades of heat.

Working.

That is,

Catalyzing.

Because (I should explain) a soul is not contained in you.

It’s a vapor you’ve inhaled and processed more

often than oxygen,

Building up over time at the edges of you

Emitted in waves

Up from gorgeous earth

Through a combination of prayer and osmosis.

And I can assure you reincarnation is a mineral process

Carried out by that stained, sienna-handed Master-Mistress of the Forge,

Turning soul and its sister soil,

re-synthesizing Iron and Mica and Word to meld Old Mind and New Body.