Three prayers, then silence

We pray to the west shore.

This being — your god, we don’t know his name — this being eats through the sand and gets between your toes. He wraps him­self in skin foil, in body-bags and debris. He does not accept pray­ers before sun­rise, no mat­ter how earn­est or plead­ing they might be. He looks down and observes the crawl­ing souls, but doesn’t extend a hand to scoop them up because his fin­gers are wrapped tight around an archive of words, all the verses and mur­mured pray­ers he com­mis­sioned from the greatest minds alive, and he has become too pro­tect­ive of them, too guarded. He refuses to let even a syl­lable fall from his grasp in exchange for sav­ing a single soiled nat­ive from the oncom­ing tide.

We pray to the east shore.

Here, your god is dead. The skin foil has long ago been shred­ded, the body-bags unzipped and emp­tied of their walk­ing bones. The debris has been fash­ioned into statues of lust, pleas­ing to the eye and to the caress­ing touch. Feb­rile minds, drunk on blustery air car­ried in on the waves, can eas­ily ima­gine these shapely forms being open and com­pli­ant. Rape is the price of such pro­gress, such dis­eased ima­gin­a­tions, and under their inva­sions these child-bearing hips of con­crete and metal will, if impreg­nated, give birth to the future. The beach­combers dream of nat­ives who won’t crawl in the mud, but will instead run into the sea and wash them­selves until they’re adults, bled clean and ready to breed for the first time. Words, mean­while, are his­tory, washed away in the murky brine.

Behind our massed ranks of name­less, num­ber­less sol­diers — the eager, war­mon­ger­ing front line, then the unpro­tec­ted can­non fod­der, fol­lowed by the scared to shiv­er­ing rear gun­ners — north clings des­per­ately to gravity’s embrace. She wants to believe in the earth in all its roots, stones and cor­puscles, and she prays fer­vently to be held forever and ever, amen.

We look south.
We bow our heads.
We pray to no one.