Religious Instruction
By Mina Loy
This misalliance
follows the custom
for female children
To adhere to maternal practices
While the atheist father presides over
the prattle of the churchgoer
with ironical commentary from his arm-chair
But by whichever
religious route
to brute
reality
our forebears speed us
There is often a pair
of idle adult
accomplices in duplicity
to impose upon their brood
an assumed acceptance
of the grace of God
defamed as human megalomania
seeding the Testament
with inconcievable chastisement
and of Christ
who
come with his light
of toilless lilies
To say “fear
not it is I”
wanting us to be fearful
He who bowed the ocean tossed
with holy feet
which supposedly dead
are suspended over head
neat-
ly crossed in anguish
wounded with red
varnish
From these
slow-drying bloods of mysticism
mysteriously
the something-soul emerges
miserably
and instinct (of economy)
in every race
for reconstructing debris
has planted an avenging face
in outer darkness
. . .
The lonely peering eye
of humanity
looked into the Néant
and turned away
. . .
Ova’s consciousness
impulsive to commit itself to justice
—to arise and walk
its innate straight way
out of the
accidence of circumstance—
collects the levitate chattels
of its will and makes for the
magnetic horizon of liberty
with the soul’s foreverlasting
opposition
to disintegration
So this child of Exodus
with her heritage of emigration
often
“sets out to seek her fortune”
in her turn
trusting to terms of literature
dodging the breeders’ determination
not to return “entities sent on consignment”
by their maker Nature
except in a condition
of moral
effacement
Lest Paul and Peter
never
notice the creatures
ever had had Fathers
and Mothers
They were disgraced in their duty
should such spirits
take an express passage
through the family bodies
to arrive at Eternity
as lovely as they originally
promised
So on whatever days
she chose to “run away”
the very
street corners of Kilburn
close in upon Ova
to deliver her
into the hands of her procreators
Oracle of civilization
‘Thou shalt not live by dreams alone
but by every discomfort
that proceedeth out of
legislation’
Mina Loy, “Religious Instruction” from Lunar Baedeker and Times-Tables (Highlands, NC: Jonathan Williams Publisher, 1958). Copyright 1958 by Mina Loy. Reprinted with the permission of Roger L. Conover for the Estate of Mina Loy.
Source:
Lunar Baedeker and Time Tables
(The Jargon Society, 1958)
