Bad Poetry with Christian Content Warning

I didn't think of a Christian post yesterday. I thought of one that at least refers to Christian concepts on Monday. 

On Friday, the Poets & Storytellers United issued this poetry challenge: 

https://poetsandstorytellersunited.blogspot.com/2023/05/friday-writings-77-dj-sucks.html

The late Charles Merrill Smith once wrote a really funny essay about how a gospel song that was popular with his generation, my grandparents' generation, included all the features he didn't like in church music. It wasn't written for choral singing or for instrumental performance while people prayed. It was written to be sung as a solo, by an untrained voice, with a focus on me. 

The song the Rev. Dr. Smith considered so bad was "In the Garden." A lot of people sang it in the early twentieth century. Jim Reeves sang it. Four generations of my family have held a consensus of opinion that most songs Jim Reeves sang were on the soppy side but that his voice and style rendered them at least bearable. Laughable parody-bait, maybe, but bearable.

I don't want to do a parody of "In the Garden." It'd be dead easy, because I happened to listen to the song lyrics on a day when the adults I knew were ecstatic because my brother had started trying to walk. I seriously thought it was a song about some other father-of-a-toddler...But no. Too many of my elders liked that song too much. 

There is another little gospel ditty that's such an easy target, parodists have tended to pass it by...

It was a lovely day. I wouldn't have wanted to be out in public view, due to glyphosate reactions, but it was only cramps and narcolepsy. I got some things done around the house, and then I was online from a screened porch in the middle of a white-flower garden in May.

Nothing else smells quite like a white garden in May. If anything could, it could be sold for pounds of gold per ounce. White roses, privet, honeysuckle, white violets, iris, wild strawberries, and fleabane daisies all blooming together. I just revelled in that scent all afternoon.

At the back of my mind was another poetry challenge, on DVerse, to write a poem to, or about, or in aid of, a poet who was in prison for writing poetry. Relatively few even of that crowd of serious poets tried it, although Paul Vincent Cannon gave them a nice short list of currently imprisoned poets to begin with. Much reference was made to Maya Angelou, and someone mentioned Ai Weiwei. 

I don't usually sign petitions from Reprieve. I'm not absolutely opposed to the death penalty, and I have no way of knowing what convicts in foreign countries did and didn't do. Some people on death row may belong there. Some people on whose behalf Reprieve e-mails out petitions are in fact murderers. Some of them even admit it. Who am I to tell other people's governments how to dispose of their murderers?

But my mind caught on a phrase in a recent e-mail from that organization. A young man wrote one of those annoying shove-the-addressee's-given-name-into-a-form-letter-to-make-yourself-sound-as-if-you-might-be-a-cousin sort of e-mails, pleading with strangers to help save his father, who was on death row in Saudi Arabia "for sarcasm." The petition he was asking people to sign is addressed to Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. 

Coincidentally, Salman also happens to be the given name of the sarcastic man--Salman Alodah. It is associated with the word salem, peace, and translated as "peaceful." It has a precise Hebrew equivalent, which most Bibles render as Solomon, from shalom. 

Here I stand to testify that some of us are just born sarcastic and can't do a thing about it. I ought to know. I've tried. But I've always found some consolation--and sarcastic people need consolation when we've tried to write serious things and been told they sounded sarcastic!--in the Bible. 

In II Samuel 16:5-14, we are told that a miserable little man called Shimei came out to curse the great King David. 

David had been told by a prophet that he would inherit the throne of King Saul, the mighty war chief whose mind was starting to fail. Naturally David thought that meant that, by becoming a palace person, he might have a chance to marry one of Saul's daughters --and he did. As the king's son in law, he was placed among the princes in the army, and became their friend. He was especially close to the youngest prince, Jonathan. He was prepared to wait for as long as Jonathan lived to inherit the throne.

But it didn't take long. Saul's mind deteriorated fast. He accused David and his own children of conspiring against him, banished them, threatened their lives. Then he led his three sons into battle, and all four men died on one battlefield. Some expected David to rejoice. He mourned. He sat around writing a lament for Jonathan, saying that "Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in death they were not divided," and even that Jonathan's "love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." Since neither of them was ever accused of failing to appreciate the love of women this has traditionally been interpreted as an affirmation of sex-free bonding with an army buddy. 

By the time of II Samuel 16 David ahd been king for some time. His eight wives' twenty-some children were young adults, fine-looking ones too. The one whose looks attracted most comments was Absalom, whom David must have hoped to make his heir, having had a vision that the temple he wanted to build was to be built by his heir who would be a man of peace. "Absalom" means a man of peace. Absalom had rebelled, raised a little rebel army, and threatened his father's life and throne, but David loved this hotheaded son of his and was riding out to meet Absalom as a concerned father. He was prepared to fight, but he was seeking peace. 

And at this stressful moment, up comes this wretched Shimei, probably suicidal, cursing David, throwing rocks and dirt at him, calling him nasty names, accusing him of having killed Saul's family. 

If you were a feudal monarch, positively expected to kill anyone who spoke against you, and some old fool accused you of having murdered your best buddy, what would you do? We're told the name of only one palace person, but probably there were several volunteers in David's entourage, who thought David was too grief-stricken to do the reasonable thing, and volunteered to go and take off Shimei's head.

And David, who was credited with killing "tens of thousands" of enemy soldiers but never really liked killing anybody, wanted to meet with Absalom as a man of peace so he said, "Let him curse!" 

David and his heir Solomon had no quarrel with the other descendants of Abraham. They entertained the descendants of Abraham through Keturah with special honor, and made a real festival of a visit even from the Queen of Sheba, though it would have been more polite if they'd been visited by the king or the prince. They said nothing about the ancient quarrels between the servants of Isaac and Ishmael, and always remembered that Abraham's first two sons, themselves, had behaved like brothers to one another. The Arabs always remembered them as divinely inspired prophets as well as kings.

And they upheld the freedom of speech, even if an old fool, undoubtedly suffering from the same painful disorder of the brain that Saul had had, was falsely accusing them of having murdered their best friends.

If I were a better poet, and not a mere sarcastic dabbler in Bad Poetry (TM), I would have written a poem exhorting the Saudi Prince Mohammed Bin Salman to be like Solomon Ben David, and show mercy on the old man who has already been beaten for his "sarcasm." Sarcasm is not a fatal disease of the brain like Saul's. It is a mere defect, causing pain to those afflicted with it only when we think a good serious poem ought to be written and feel unable to write one. Even so, a prince ought to have some mercy on a lowly sufferer from sarcasm. Good Muslims are allowed to show mercy. Why not reduce this sarcastic man's sentence to exile, and send him to some little town in some place like Germany, where there is no king and sarcastic people have to snark about things like the weather?

But I had not thought of a way to make a poem out of this thought, and then up came my Professional Bad Neighbor, spraying poison too close to the Mountain Spring again. The chemical scent in that evil mix of dicamba and glyphosate overpowered the scent of the flowers. Like most chemical sprays it's always the last thing I'm able to smell for a while. My throat started to feel raspy. My mood became un-creative, not even sarcastic, and grumpy. I lost interest in writing poetry and started thinking of topics like "Proposed Schedule of Torture for Glyphosate Sprayers." 

Bah, humbug. When I'm not having an acute glyphosate reaction I don't want to torture glyphosate manufacturers. The Bible never actually says that Satan has to spend eternity torturing sinners in an Eternal Fire, but that doesn't mean I want that job. 

But it did give me an idea for the song parody 

 

I actually thought of a song that I've often pointed out as an example of everything I don't like in church music. I thought of a parody of that song about the Professional Bad Neighbor's misdeeds. That would not have been much fun to read. Maybe I'll do a more amusing parody of that song another day.

Meanwhile, here, dedicated to the Professional Bad Neighbor and to other people who claim to have "been saved" while actingas if they'd dedicated their lives to the Evil Principle, is a short singable parody of the little nursery song...

Jesus love you? He does not!

On His name you are a blot.

Unrepentant of your sin,

Heaven's Gate you can't go in.

Jesus regrets you, Jesus regrets you,

Jesus regrets you are going down below.