Where’s it gone? God of my childhood,

with your attendant monstrosities

have a little warmth on me, bent and frozen.

Hastily now and again it seems You can hear

even the farmyard rats

gnaw at cobs and whatever fresh dead’s around.

Though it’s confusing to see the golden

seaport alongside of that—

well, such is the human eye that doesn’t get to choose

unless it trains, and I wasn’t given the gift of exercise.

I will not say You’ve given me a terrified silence,

nor absence, nor presence, nor the sun gone red and down,

whose going You can’t protect.

Let me, dusky godsend, never believe You protect.