Oh God,
thou knowest I would rather plough the starfields
into little rows, and weed them by the sweat
of my brow, to clear the land for this next
season’s crop for thy celestial garners.
I would gather every dead star skeleton
for thee, decompose them back into black gold
nebulae for thy hungry galaxies,
let them spread their roots beneath the surface
of thy eternal spacetime continuum.

Oh God,
thy work is one eternal round-up, and I
would work for thee to raise thy planets
into powerhouses, transform every fallen
world into urim and thummim, endless sea
of iridescent glass, fill the emptiness
of space with thy glory. I would cultivate
light out of others’ terrestrial waste.
Just not mine. Oh please, let me sit quiet with
thee on thy divine tractor, and I won’t

ever complain as we bump our way down
the furrows of distant space to spread thy clumps
of matter that lie like manure piles
on the fields. Let thy matter unorganized
always be yonder, never in me.
Keep the sharp blades of thy harrow away
from my tender soil. My palms were never
accustomed to this kind of labor. Oh,
let there be light in someone else’s dark!
Oh God,

go plant thy divine seeds in some other
human heart, go tame some other corner
of thy cosmic wilderness. I would sooner
propagate thy work and glory in any
other man. My heart is too broken, too
overgrown to make Eden out of these, my
stubborn thorns and thistles. Let us go down
to another place less painful, that I
may be always the gardener and never
the garden. Amen.

Christopher Bissett

BYU Studies Publications