Sticky Fingers Sermon
By Richard Collins
The weakness then of infant limbs, not its will, is its innocence.
– Augustine
We children are natural anarchists
who recognize no property rights
We steal things to hold the world in our hands
fight for bits and pieces temporarily ours
And throw them away with alacrity
like so many tantrums without regret
Knowing it will all be spanked away
one capitalist lesson at a time
Heirs to every parental indiscretion
our ancestors warned us about and scorned
The bad boys (so we were told we were)
took what wasn’t ours but (for a moment) was
Loquats and Christmas lights, lemons and cash
cap guns in belt buckles that fired at a belly push
Punishments dealt us like witches at the stake
shamelessness our cloak of faux innocence
Augustine knew from experience what
each of us knows just craving what we want
We follow in the footsteps of selfish genes
moms and dads, less tabulae rasae than palimpsests
Say what the Grand Inquisitors will
say what preachers expect us to stomach
All that sketchy Adam and Eve stuff, the fortunate fall
there’s still no such thing as an original sin.
Richard Collins, abbot of the New Orleans Zen Temple, directs Stone Nest Dojo in Sewanee, Tennessee. Dean Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at California State University, Bakersfield, he has taught at universities in California, Louisiana, Bulgaria, Romania, and Wales. His work has appeared in Religion and the Arts, Sagesses Bouddhistes (France), Urthona: Buddhism and the Arts (UK), Shō Poetry Journal, Think, The Plenitudes, and Pensive. His poetry has been nominated for Best Spiritual Literature and a Pushcart. His books include No Fear Zen (2015), and a translation of Taisen Deshimaru’s Autobiography of a Zen Monk (2022), Also, most recently, In Search of the Hermaphrodite: A Memoir (Tough Poets Press, 2024) and Stone Nest: Poems (Shanti Arts, forthcoming).