Sunday Sermon

Sometimes a sting of gossiping
                     is spirituality. Just
                                       observed
a mutilation, and memory verse
                        and the lost history
of insulin, calligraphy in the street
of Galilee overlap
while wearing the robe
          of a silver hypocrisy of a sect
the ventilator of the Eden
                               had a rapture.
The ventricles, the nerdy tongues
lick your sins thenceforth
                                 with a prayer
dipping in the Jordan.
Even Jezebel tried to raise her
godliness, the serrated dagger
                                 in her bosom
in the sheath of night
                       and Cain’s futility
what would you call it?

And Sunday sermons are
                            like balloons
alongside puffed rice almost
take a glance at the nutrition level
hurray,                     a camel passes
through the           eye of a needle!
Those               cuckoos are gullible,
to be                           in a cocoon.

Pitambar Naik grew up in Odisha in India. He’s an award-winning poet and the author of a book of poetry, The Anatomy of Solitude (Hawakal Publishers). His work is forthcoming in The Indian Quarterly and has appeared across 10 countries in The World Belongs To Us (Anthology): HarperCollins India, Eunoia Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Formercactus, Occulum, Vayavya, Dream Noir Magazine, Literary Orphans, Joao Roque Literary Journal, and Hakara among others.