Doux

God's Image

In my time as
art teacher,
starvation wages
caffeine withdrawal
swallowing hunger and shame

my six-year-old asks:
when we are older
and you have finished
teaching us how to draw everything,
what will you teach us then?

I don't tell him I'm leaving
this godforsaken city in a month.
Children's hearts are the easiest to break
and therefore
the hardest,
and I open a mouth filled
with the usual lies you tell children
when he asks
When you have finished teaching us everything,
will you teach us how to draw God?

My stupefied silence wonders
what God looks like in his
six-year-old mind.

It is the same silence that observed
God's death
far away in high universities
existentialist professors
intellectual, half-suicidal
feeding the late teenage ennui

I was his age when my faith
slipped away, painlessly
in my mother's arms when she,
more faithful than I,
said there's no proof for anything,
you know, it's all about what you believe.

I can't tell my six-year-old how
Neitzche killed God long before
either of us were born
that it was not ennui,
but hunger
acid-burn on the inside of belly
which is the only god there is.

Failing to conceive the image of godlessness
my six-year-old and I stare over
his set of beginner's oil pastels,
the silence wavers
across an abyss of unbelieving.