Tesla on Immortality

This evening as I passed a chapel,

the fragrance of candlewax and blossoms

blended with memories of my father,

those iconed hours he spent tending the spirit.

Hands pressed flat on the pulpit,

he'd lean in practiced rapture

promising paradise and eternal life.

His tone was so low and glowing

that for a time I, too, believed.

And now they say even Edison,

inspired by séances,

devises gadgets to hear the dead speak -

radios receiving the short waves

of faith's frequencies.

But I would tell them both

how the soul, like breathing,

is a function of the flesh,

machinery of tendon and artery

humming with electrical haloes,

blessed by vibration and flame.

Why foul the brief brilliance of such a temple,

trade its radiance for whispering spirits,

for psalms and the cupped blood of Christ?

Let memory resurrect the dead

while graves, like fallen altars, go ignored,

attended only by sculpted angels

who gaze down, brooding

over the bare white logic of bones.