When God Isn’t Watching (a poem)

My latest poem. I’ve been wanting to write this for a long time now, and I finally got to sit down and do it. The idea was overwhelming, and it’s a huge relief to have gotten it off my chest at last.

Thank you for reading!

When God Isn’t Watching

When God isn’t watching
And she lets herself be consumed by a pain I don’t understand
I stand there watching her,
Silently breaking into tiny, sacred flakes of cotton
The way God’s words will on the Day of Judgment
As she screams of sin
Of God’s wrath
Of hell
She confesses things I don’t understand as sins
She screams, plucking her heart out of her soul
Her spirit, her strength shriveling up
And she withers into submission to the Divine
I stand still, watching from afar
As I make sense of her pain
Pain caused by the wrath of a Being I don’t know how to love
By the guilt of transgression against an almighty God
By the love of a God embedded in her soul
And yet, yet, she breathes a sigh of joy into the world
A sigh that guides her out of nothingness
But into a universe that belongs to her
And she slowly molds herself back into the perfection she embodies
She again becomes all things sacred
The things she touches and feels and desires become sacred
The spaces she occupies become sacred
All aura around her beams with her noor, the noor of God
For indeed, heaven lies beneath her feet
Time and again, when God isn’t watching,
She becomes her own God,
Her own heaven and her own hell
I still watch from a distance, wondering
Wondering how she finds solace in a merciless God who
Chooses to remain oblivious to her pain
As she breaks over and over, mending herself over and over again
But alone
When God isn’t watching

~ Orbala
December 15, 2014