Gale Acuff – My Sunday School teacher swears that Jesus

died so that I don't have to, or I have

to but I'll get it all back, life that is,

at least a little but probably

a lot more when I go to Heaven or

my soul does and gets a new body and

has fun forever, that's eternally

to boot but when I told her that I'm still

dead even in everlasting life she

kicked me out of the room so I killed time

in the cemetery behind our church,

I've got relatives there, they're dead mostly

and yet they're still alive somehow and that's

pretty much what religion is and then

I walked home early and alone for good.

 

                                           --Gale Acuff
________________________________
 



Nobody lives forever my Sunday

 

School teacher says and I guess she should know,

she's 25 to my 10 so she's old

enough to know if not everything (you

have to be dead to know it all) but what

counts the most at least among the living

which is where we're among at, you might say,

and I did and I bet that nobody

has ever said it quite that way before

and that's what I told her after class but

she laughed and gave back Gale, run on home now,

I'll see you next Sunday and I damn near

said I'll see you in my dreams and I wish

I'd said that first, too, but sometimes

other mouths say more. So I don't listen.

Gale Acuff has had hundreds of poems published in a dozen countries and has authored three books of poetry. His poems have appeared in Ascent, Reed, Arkansas Review, Poem, Slant, Aethlon, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Carolina Quarterly, Roanoke Danse Macabre, Ohio Journal, Sou’wester, South Dakota Review, North Dakota Quarterly, New Texas, Midwest Quarterly, Poetry Midwest, Adirondack Review, Worcester Review, Adirondack Review, Connecticut River Review, Delmarva Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Maryland Literary Review, George Washington Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Ann Arbor Review, Plainsongs, Chiron Review, George Washington Review, McNeese Review, Weber, War, Literature & the Arts, Poet Lore, Able Muse, The Font, Fine Lines, Teach.Write., Oracle, Hamilton Stone Review, Sequential Art Narrative in Education, Cardiff Review, Tokyo Review, Indian Review, Muse India, Bombay Review, Westerly, and many other journals. Gale has taught tertiary English courses in the US, PR China, and Palestine.