Father, I needed bread
...........and you gave sin & guilt & shame.
Father, I asked for bread...and you gave
..........a sense of dishonour, self-loathing, ignobility.
Father, I yearned for bread ... and you gave me
..........neglect, hope-amputation & spirit-pruning.
Father, I asked to taste the Bread of Life
.......... and you gave me monkeys: blind faith,
............dulled sense, and dumb necessity.
Father, I asked for yeasty bread...and you gave
.......... sacharine, reproach, old curse & predestination.
Father, I asked for new whole bread...and you calculated
..........the interest rates I'd pay, threw me
..........the Protestant Work Ethic...and left me
.........with Quotations from the Bible.
Father, I asked you for the bread of heaven
......... and this abstact scripture is poison stone.
Father, I want to ask you... to give me
.........my share of the inheritance...so I can live
........ prodigal in a far country.
But I don't, knowing you'd work for me
.......to come back, while fattening a spirit-calf
.......you will not kill.
Father, who is my father?
1991 © Wayne David Knoll
He is most definitely an anti-poetic father, refusing all upcoming poetry in preference for the miracle of lies. God help this matriarchical patriach of fact-facing blindness, the religionist of sure method and money. You cannot tell him a thing he wants to hear about the work of lilies or the carefreeness of common sparrows. He owes the pharisee and he does not know how to pay. Christ was never so wronged. Here is a walking cemetery, seeing our humanity in tombs through the black bibles stuck deep in his eyes.
Compost of Dreams
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About Me
- Wayne D Knoll
- I am a 4th-to-6th generation Australian of Silesian (Prusso-Polish), Welsh, Schwabian-Württemberg German, yeoman English, Scots, & Cornish stock; all free settlers who emigrated between 1848-1893 as colonial pioneers. I am the 2nd of 7 brothers and a sister raised on the income off 23 acres. I therefore belong to an Australian Peasantry which historians claim doesn't exist. I began to have outbreaks of poetry in 1975 when training for a Diploma of Mission Theology in Melbourne. I've since done a BA in Literature and Professional Writing and Post-graduate Honours in Australian History. My poem chapbook 'Compost of Dreams' was published in 1994. I have built a house of trees and mud-bricks, worked forests, lived as a new-pioneer, fathered-n-raised two sons and a daughter, and am now a proud grandfather. I have worked as truck fresh-food farmer, a freelance foliage-provider, been a member of a travelling Christian Arts troupe, worked as duty officer and conflict resolutionist with homeless alcoholic men, been editor/publisher of a Journal of Literature for Christian Pilgrimage, a frontier researcher, done poetry in performance seminars in schools and public events.
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