“There are hundreds of lives here, a lot of struggle, washed up on the beach,” said Bill Lacovara, a Ventnor insurance adjuster who was fishing last month with his son when he spotted a flowered plastic shopping bag and waded out to retrieve it. “This is just a hint of what really happens. How many letters like this all over the world aren’t being opened or answered?”
[“Letters to God End Up in Ocean, Unread” by Wayne Parry, Associated Press, Nov. 2, 2006]

A plastic shopping bag crammed with begging letters
bobs in the Jersey breakers, miles from God.
When Rev. Grady Cooper met his end,
though he’d promised to pray, dispatch the pleading up,
some unknown person dumped in a handy ocean
old envelopes with messages purportedly unread.

But how can we know for sure what’s read, unread?
Omniscience might decode the most arcane lettering,
yea, though it repose upon the ocean’s
fishy floor. “This is my letter to my God
who never wrote to me. Put up
or shut up. Let me win the Pick-4. I’m at the end

of my faith-rope.” Or, “I ought to end
this correspondence since You never learned to read.
You laugh while the smoke of sacrifice mounts up;
a wall of flesh implores, incised with ghastly lettering;
rough-bearded men play contact sports with rival gods.
A prophet writhes in the gut of an endangered ocean

mammal. And we are not free.” Far from any ocean,
taxed by all the rigors of leadership in the End
Times, pastors in wingtips brandish the Word of God
like a holy nightstick. Later, we get to read
boilerplate apologies for “sin.” Letters
to the flock euphemize lust-driven fuckups

tough to avoid when any peccadillo can show up
on YouTube. There’s an ocean
of sin out there, not all of it specific to the arts and letters
types. When the evangelical circle jerk ends,
hair shirts get donned in a trice. Penitents read
scripture around the clock, bend over for God’s

loving lash. Blogging might be a good activity for God,
a cost-effective way to give the faithful a heads up.
And then the deity could simply delete all unread
e-mails from his in-box, making ocean
dumping obsolete. But personally, I’m for ending
this whole tradition of dead letters.

I know a grave gray god whose name is Ocean.
Far up the beach where the killing ends,
ceaselessly she reads abandoned bones, unlettered blood.