Poem: "Scales"
This poem came from the August 2-3 2011 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from siliconshaman and my_partner_doug. It was sponsored by laffingkat.
Scales
The Lightbringer's job
was to carry the morning star,
lambent candle against the fading night.
Illumination was always his business.
When a scapegoat was needed,
it was a simple thing to turn
enlightenment into hellfire and brimstone.
Was not the Word of God necessarily true?
After all, the Universe so respected God
that "Let there be light!" caused light to exist
so as to avoid embarrassing God with an untruth.
Yet the Lightbringer remained a celestial soul,
however besmirched with sin and soot,
like a candle hidden beneath a hood.
In that latter-day Garden,
he wound himself around the Tree,
tasted the facts of its fruit
and told those truths to the Woman.
This is the thing that people forget:
The Serpent never lied. It was God
who spoke of death that did not come that day.
All down the long years of history,
the Lightbringer twined coils of correction, whispering
things that God said Man was not meant to know,
always seeking to balance the scales.
This is the thing that people must remember:
in the valley of the shadow,
follow the Light.