My God does not

My God does not order me
to burn people at the stake
because our homes,
with roofs falling, water gushing in
and the cries of millions dying,
move around the sun.

My God does not hold me back,
when we make love on rainy nights,
to tell me how pleasure can be an impediment
in my path to salvation. She does not tell a woman
that ending it will forever make her a murderer.

My God does not frown upon
the fork that slices my beef steak,
he does not search my refrigerator
to justify the garland of carcasses
that hang from the beak of the night.

My God does not ask me
to lynch people in his name,
over the meat they ate, women they loved
and kingdoms they built,

she does not demand temples, mosques and churches
to be built on wastelands that stink with the smell
of mass graves and tears of half-widows.

My god never asked me
not to love another man
with the same passion
that I hold a woman’s breasts.

My god is not a white man
who kisses his cassock with the smile of benediction,
nor is he a saffron saint with a tilak
who sells his religion for a place in parliament.

My God never lived in Jerusalem or Mecca or Varanasi.

She is not a saint or a politician,
not an actor or a warlord,
nor a protector or a sage.

My God is not.

Instead,
my God is a benign lover,
peculiar, friendly, undemanding,
who sits beside me naked
at half past one.

As the rain touches the low of her back
and passion rises like a rainbow
in the wild calculus of her hips,

my God reads to me the Communist Manifesto
like a joker who pulls his tricks on strangers.

And amidst the equivocation and protests,
when the pain crosses all barriers
on wild nights like these,

my God quietly takes me in her arms
and teaches me about the disaster of life.