Rusty Lynn
Response
ORIGINAL SIN SIGNALS
Tyson West
If Jesus was god and knew everything
Then why didn’t he tell us some parable
About cosmic background radiation
Left over from the Big Bang.
Even if he didn’t want to scare the crap out of Peter
And his disciples
Or lose Paul on the road to Damascus
He could have at least told Joseph Smith (who wasn’t scared of anything) and
Who could have translated it into the book of Mormon
After all, it is way more interesting
Than genealogical recitations of patriarchs and sinners
With funny names and opaque character development.
In all those years since Marconi learned
How to play catch with radio waves
And my mom and dad as kids listened
On the floor next to the cathedral wooden radio’s glowing dial
To Jack Benny and Rochester
Lucky Strike Greens and Franklin Roosevelt talk about fear itself and all the Great Depression stuff
Like bread lines
And the lead up to the D Day
And if you didn’t get the dial tuned in tight
And sometimes even when you did
Voices would pop and sputter
And the big swing band sounded like cooking French fries
And Baby Snooks like Dracula—they had no clue.
It wasn’t some prophet or preacher
But a couple of nerd professors in 1964
Who built this radio telescope and who figured that belches and farts and globs of sliding noise on the radio
Were echoes left over from the old God’s suicide vest going off
Saying goodbye to his singularity
To create a new God out of dust and ash
And sounds of the explosion spread out and reverberated
Kind of like original sin only cooler because it was signaling
Before we had souls sins could stick to
For the waters of baptism to wash off.
March, 2012
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