This

The profound question:
What happens after we die?

What a surprise it would be,
If this,
Were it.


~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

Conditional

Waiting,
Listening,
Praying for divine guidance,
As long as the holy message
Conforms
With certain theological predilections
And does not require
Too much humility.


~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

A New World

I am different today,
Changed by the passage of something other than time,
Something that resides in the mind,
Something that pushes forward,
Pushes back,
Something that transcends,
Something that forgets.

I would be washed clean someday,
Not by mental infirmity,
But by one life flowing into the next,
What some call heaven,
What some anticipate as a grand reunion,
All those lost loved ones,
Found again.

I have no special knowledge of the afterlife
Or whether the fervent hopes of the heart
Have any effect on the journey of the soul.
If my prayers would be granted,
I would become a child again,
In a new life,
In a new world where I could live awhile.


~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved

In This Place

This is all we know,
These caffeinated mornings
And crowded freeway commutes,
These peopled places,
Marked,
Altered.

Scheduled repose,
Manufactured entertainments,
The occasional exodus to nature
With the proper reservations,
Row 32,
Space 6.

But doesn’t it all seem a little strange sometimes,
This concoction of paradise and purgatory?
And how blurred their boundaries,
How blurred within our limitless eternal selves,
Living out this highly contrived finite physical existence.

Do you long to resolve contradictions
And in so doing,
Increase their numbers?

We believe what we want to believe
Until belief itself is finally exhausted,
A small, hard thing,
So difficult to discard.


~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved