" title="Painted, spoken James Aitchison
Passwords
Is godliness a separate biotype?
I went to church and counted organ pipes.
You can’t find god unless he fingers you;
I sat untouched in my Church of Scotland pew.
If multinationals – the Israelites,
Muslims and Christians – hold world copyright
to true religion, the sacred impulse
I feel when writing poems must be false.
Not false, exactly, but illicit, flawed
if there is no religion without god.
Then I heard Heaney say on Radio Four,
‘Poetry is never wholly secular.’
I can’t swallow a sacramental host
but my poems play hide-and-seek with a holy ghost.
The impulses that drive me to create
are mysteries, but natural, innate.
A poet’s games of hide-and-seek are prayers
for passwords through mind’s lowest, wordless layers.
Prayers, passwords, poems and – Blasphemy?
I re-create the holy ghost in me.
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