Notes To a Young Apostate

Frank Schaeffer
Sent by Facebook Mentions
Jun 1st, 12:36pm

Thanks for keeping me posted, I’d like to post a selection of your work here. Would you send say 4 to 8 poems and also a paragraph of bio?
Stephen Brown
Jun 3rd, 3:43pm
I would like that, Frank. I’ll send you something this evening.
Frank Schaeffer
Sent by Facebook Mentions
Jun 5th, 1:46am
thanks
Stephen Brown
Jun 7th, 11:16pm
Frank, please forgive me for the delay – I found myself overwhelmed this week by the demands of work and family.

These six poems are part of an as-yet-unpublished collection that I call Gospel & Other Poems. I remember that previously I gave you “Notes to a Young Apostate” and that you shared it on Facebook, yet I feel that it belongs with these poems and that it anchors this short set nicely.

I hope this will do as a bio:

“Stephen Brown is a Los Angeles area poet and artist. He was raised by Calvinists and indoctrinated in Christian schools. Now in his fifties, a longtime refugee from the Evangelical culture of certainty, he is profoundly grateful to the writers and artists who opened doors of inquiry to him and who lit and nurtured the fires of imagination which have sustained him.”

Poems by Stephen Brown

Speaking With Deity

See the boys breathing
dandelion wishes,
two each, saying one
out loud and one to self
(as wishes be).

Watch them fly apart,
seeds ‘coptering from view
on the softest of eddies.

^^
Call and Response

Are you coming to church?
Good news always sleeps ’til noon.

**

Sometimes a Thing

Blossoms need bouquets
kisses want lips
air asks for wings.

Sometimes a thing
wants to be stolen.

**
Afterlife

Hope’s feeble flicker.
Heart’s ceaseless bicker.

Natter, natter, natter.
I matter.

**
Impromptu, No. 2
(The Tao of Breakfast)

In the grand scheme of things
it doesn’t diminish the void,
but over easy
is the way eggs please me.

**
Notes To a Young Apostate

Steal a Bible. Learn
to live with yourself.

Take a Gideon’s
from a motel room and
leave it in the boardroom
at church, open to

the Sermon On the Mount.

Nail it, maybe, to the door.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace

Available now on Amazon