The Ambassador of the Interior Has a Talking to With the Minister of the Cabinet of Vengeance

By Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer
God started small                     At the first showdown
between good and evil       God didn’t come at anyone

like a cowboy       God didn’t open with solar flares
or asteroids       or mass extinction            or planetary heat death

God didn’t outgun anyone               God outmanned them
God made man        in the face of the beast

And in the face of the beast      God made     —from inside 
the great and gaping maw         while languishing

in the hot damp                           In the face of that 
great terror          God summoned the smallest—

adrenaline        serotonin        hemoglobin        oxytocin        motes
of possibility      God started by making—

light into land masses      sand into vessels      preservation
as civilization   and sometimes   God won
 

Copyright Credit: Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer, "The Ambassador of the Interior Has a Talking to with the Minister of the Cabinet of Vengeance." Copyright © 2019 by Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer. Used by permission of the author for PoetryNow.
Source: PoetryNow (2019)