A Poem for Harold Camping

James Tissot (1836-1902), "Peter and John Run to the Sepulchre" 

Faith

dedicated to Harold Camping


Now he will have to face
the breathing machine,
the morphine, the ordinary
death, the humiliation
of having thought himself 
bestowed with a rare place
in the ecclesiastical annals,
a soul privileged
to see the Lord
returning on the clouds,
to meet him in the air.
At 89, he at last
encounters his mortality
and trembles, wondering if 
his faith, too, will prove mortal.
“Sue,” he says to his daughter
on the phone as the hour 
of his rapture passes,
“I’m a little bewildered.”




Note: See http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-rapture-20110522,0,5118540.story