This poem when my friend Arlene Erickson, hearing about what ministers have been taught in most seminaries since the 1950s, demanded, “Why haven’t we ordinary people been told any of this stuff?” Something about the content led me to put it together in lines vaguely resembling the discipline of iambic pentameter.

“Behold,” he said, “thy path unto salvation.”

“What path?” I asked, “for all that I can see 

are thickets of incomprehension; thorns

that reach to snare unwary travellers,

quicksand salivating for a sucker,

roots that rise to trip my thoughts; and tigers 

burning bright, crouched to leap with tooth 

and claw upon my slightest flaw.