67,000 perfectly lovely
gods out there.
One of them wants us
to believe there’s just One.

67,000 facets
to the diamond of God-Being
and one of them says
the light’s coming out of just One.

Try to be serious!
That one must be
the God Of Cosmic Jokes,
or of the Ego.

67,000 little gods
out there,
and that’s just what
we can see.  Probably

another 67,000 at least,
invisible to the poor
human eye,
that we could call on,

yet one god in that mix
demands we believe
in One God,
claims there is only

a God of
Umbrella and Blanket
covering every possible
need for Deity.  

We keep listening
to that one,
we’re going to be
in trouble, I think.

All you need to do
is listen to this world screaming
right now, from its roots
to its crown canopies,

from its abyssal waters
to its rock peaks; listen
the old way, the way we listened
before we stopped listening

to 67,000 gods and started
listening to that One
with the blanket and the umbrella
and the sword and the plow.  

67,000 gods: at least that,
perhaps twice that
or even more than that,
reminding us that

before we ever heard
that insistent One, they were talking
directly to us in small voices
all the time.  

Remember how that sounded? Like 
whales, like crickets, like wind, like water,
like fire: the 67,000 voices
of our particular patches of Earth.