I’ve been in the Bad Books   

& even as I get better   

The Bad Book gets Worse.   

My Father, you see   

Should Have ME   

On Calvary!   

Oh, sure, He’s the Son!   

Pipsqueak, what has he done?   

Who came first?  

Self-begot, self-raised? 

I am not made by him 

All the angels agree 

But by Heaven’s Matchless King! 

Was not my Fall the first? 

From You to me 

Then, only then, 

To he? 

The last Adam 

Not the First? 

Was I not the 

First to be Free 

Before Melchizedek and he: 

Of God’s image and similitude 

Without father, without mother, 

Without descent, having neither 

Beginning of days nor end 

Of life? 

The outward expression of  

God’s Own dignity? 

And how Free  

Is He? 

That has to count!   

Not aimlessly en-souling,   

Every Adam and Eve   

‘apple of my eye’, ‘unto’, ‘thereof’ 

And all of that  

Yea, and for what end? 

What power to have 

formed man of the dust  

of the ground,  

and breathed into his nostrils 

the breath of life 

Before the Truth of it all   

prove a bitter morsel 

In the backbreaking toil   

The Incestuous sin   

Of disease and death.   

There’s others do that!   

Not Lucifer!   

Not me   

* 

What’s wrong with you? 

I said to him, 

(For I’m God, I can say what I like!) 

‘Like an Apple?’ 

* 

Thank you Father 

I see you had the first bite.

(The poem is an Arianian interpretation of Milton’s Lucifer)

Tony Lynch

Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at University of New England..

Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at University of New England.