The Baltimore Catechism Pseudo-Sonnets

My project this month, for as long as I’m able to continue it, is to carry on writing pseudo-sonnets, but on a different theme. This time I’m going more metaphysical, or dialectical. And the subject is one out of my childhood past: the Baltimore Catechism. For those amongst you who were not brought up Roman Catholic, the BC is basically the Pope’s Little Red Book. In Sunday School I was forced to memorize and recite each section. In fact, because of my inability to do so, I was kept back one year. But now, a self-professed lapsed catholic and spiritual agnostic, I think it’s time to truthfully answer the questions in that infamous book, for my own good. It’s my belief that only with poetry can one attempt to confront ‘reality’, that ever-changing all-encompassing mostly-unknown entity with anything capable of overcoming our misguided belief that we know it all already.

BC 1: Who Made Us?

I remember Butchee, underneath
the bed with me, hiding from a universe
too large for two-year olds, too tame for dogs.
From out of nowhere comes this memory,
as if Darwinian selection pulled
my self-existence from a pointless hat—
voila! There’s no one that I see behind
those cuff-links; there’s just my own imagination
running away with this chronology
of powers, magical or terrible,
—the swirling of cinnamon whirlpool Niagara guitars—
inciting blood inspiring organ song
bird and response with echoes we call faith
in gods, big bangs, or Henry Ford the Eighth.

~Son Rivers 2005