RELIGION Poem: Tophet, by Brandon Marlon

A smiling mask muffles the shrieks
of an infant whose soft flesh combusts
and melts amid flames spiraling upward
as parents, ingenuous if anxious,
truckle and grovel before the gruntled godling
Molekh, mollified by their oblation.

The idolatrizing throng ogles
warm embers, seeking redemption
within the ashes of a skeletonized
corpse whose bones, brittle and scorched,
heap at the feet of the statue.

Sundown witnesses the customary orgy
wherein heathens conceived during orgies past
forsake restraint in favor of abandon,
indulging whims and enmeshing limbs
with the scantily clad and close at hand,
till each breechcloth is discarded
and pervious genitals enjoy their fill.

Only now might there be profuse rains
and much yield from fields
carpeting the valleys of Canaan
or crowning terraced hilltops
across its central hill country.

Parched and famished, desert dwellers
give of themselves liberally, appealing
to deities of their own devising,
focused on pressing demands
to the exclusion of higher concerns,
unable to grapple with the immensity
of their guilt, unwilling to concede,
if only to themselves, that a society
that sacrifices its children forfeits its future.