Religiously

By Gale Acuff

PROMPT — I will not rest until ...

I'll go to Heaven when I die to be

judged saint, or damn-near, or sinner and

then be kept up yonder or booted be -low to the Bad Place when all the time all

I'll want is to be sent back down to Earth where

life is all I've known, as for eternal

life, to get that I have to die and I

don't care to and don't understand why I

must but at Sunday School they say it's God's

plan so I ask He wanted Adam and

Eve to disobey Him, you mean--at once

I hear silence but then sounds like a new

-born baby's crying after the doctor

slaps it. It's hard to make grownups grow up.

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Gale Acuff has had hundreds of poems published in eleven countries and is the author of three books of poetry. He has taught university English in the US, China, and Palestine. Acuff writes from the Arab American University in Zababdeh, Palestine.