Psalm 004 – On the Beach

I was bored today at work, with nothing really pressing to do, and so I wrote a little poem.

The piece was partly inspired by that famous story, often repeated among the modern-day evangels, about those 2 sets of footprints in the sand that suddenly become only one. The storyteller laments that Jesus has abandoned him. “No,” comforts Jesus, “That’s when I carried you.” I first encountered this tale many years ago. I was young, so it made an impression. But I wasn’t impressed in a religious sense (I really didn’t see what all the fuss was about with respect to this Jesus guy): what really moved me was the poetics of the image.

Another source, which is an inspirational story I encountered years ago in a Reader’s Digest (yeah, I know — but hey, I was extremely young, okay?), is about someone who wrote their troubles in the sand, knowing that the tide was coming in. Once again, the inspirational message was less impressive to me than the actual poetics of the image, which stuck with me.

So, with the present poem (which I’ve added to The Sacred Antinous as Psalm 004), I fused the concept of a religious saviour to the unburdening of one’s worries, and the connective tissue between them is, appropriately, the sexual eroticism of young Antinous.

You can read the poem here.