Howard Nemerov's 'boom! ' Poem by Warren Falcon

Having grown up in the Fundamentalist Christian culture of the American South, having gone to an Evangelical college on top of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee ('Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain! ' MLK's called out, the very place of my Christian education) , having peeled layers away and administered psychological high colonics to rid myself of such an education in the 'Christ-haunted landscape of the South, ' I remember the day I discovered Howard Nemerov's poem, BOOM! , just at the right time...before the evangelicals got organized and off the ground/launched as a political 'party of God, ' Nemerov saw it all growing like a vapid cancer in the Eisenhower years and wrote like an Old Testament prophet, albeit with a New Yorker martini in hand, of what he heard and saw as the growing trivialization/consumerization of American religion in an increasingly trivialized and trivializing democratic/corporation-consumer-ocracy...here is the poem! Read this with Occupy Wall Street in mind...and current wannabee presidential clowns parading plumed out in deity and Christo-sprach...ACK!

BOOM!

BOOM! by Harold Nemorov
SEES BOOM IN RELIGION, TOO

Atlantic City, June 23,1957 (AP)-President Eisenhower's pastor said tonight that Americans are living in a period of "unprecedented religious activity" caused partially by paid vacations, the eight-hour day and modern conveniences.

"These fruits of material progress" said the Rev. Edward L. R. Elson of the National Presbyterian Church, Washington, "have provided the leisure, the energy, and the means for a level of human and spiritual values never before reached."


Here at the Vespasian-Carlton, it's just one
religious activity after another: the sky
is constantly being crossed by cruciform
airplanes, in which nobody disbelieves
for a second, and the tide, the tide
of spiritual progress and prosperity
miraculously keeps rising, to a level
never before attained. The churches are full,
the beaches are full, and the filling-stations
are full, God's great ocean is full
of paid vacationers praying an eight-hour day
to the human spiritual values, the fruits,
the leisure, the energy, and the means, Lord,
the means for the level, the unprecedented level,
and the modern conveniences, which also are full.
Never before, O Lord, have the prayers and praises
from belfry and phonebooth, from ballpark and barbecue
the sacrifices, so endlessly ascended.

It was not thus when Job in Palestine
sat in the dust and cried, cried bitterly;
When Damien kissed the lepers on their wounds
it was not thus; it was not thus
when Francis worked a fourteen-hour day
strictly for the birds; when Dante took
a week's vacation without pay and it rained
part of the time, O Lord, it was not thus.

But now the gears mesh and the tires burn
and the ice chatters in the shaker and the priest
in the pulpit, and Thy Name, O Lord,
is kept before the public, while the fruits
ripen and religion booms and the sea level rises
and every modern convenience runneth over,
that it may never be with us as it hath been
with Athens and Karnak and Nagasaki,
nor Thy sun for one instant refrain from shining
on the rainbow Buick by the breezeway
or the Chris Craft with the uplift life raft;
that we may continue to be the just folks we are,
plain people with ordinary superliners and
disposable diaperliners, people of the stop'n'shop
‘n'pray as you go, of hotel, motel, boatel,
the humble pilgrims of no deposit no return
and please adjust thy clothing, who will give to Thee,
if Thee will keep us going, our annual
Miss Universe, for Thy Name's Sake, Amen.