“The absence of God,” wrote George Bataille,
“is greater, and more divine, than God.”
Which is an idea God might have come up with
if he’d been French and worried
about how to make it through
the twentieth century. Do you want this?
If I take it away, will you want it more?
Or will you forget? That’s the problem
with absence, it leave itself open
to so much. Supernatural forces,
for example. Glowing lights,
out of which aliens appear
like anorexic children. Let us help you,
they say, although of course they never speak.
Once they just wanted to take over the planet.
Now they feel sorry for us,
the way God must have felt when he chose
to retire into his silence.
No more threats. No more angels, either.
Only these lost children, come back
to startle us, and vanish.
Clod & Pebble 