a statement on faith (1927): rachael gilbert

1. describe yourself. it can be in a poem, prose, whatever. the only catch? you can’t use phrases like “i like...” or “my favorite…” define yourself in more than just those surface terms, go beyond skin deep. i want to know you, not your favorite tv show.
2. rant about exactly twelve things. they can be things that are pet peeves (slow walking people), day-to-day annoyances (mayonnaise, emojis, etc.) or things you find fundamentally wrong. go into detail, tell us why you hate it.
3. take on the persona of someone completely different from yourself. tell a story from their eyes. they can be from a different time period, place, etc. but avoid getting too whimsical (no aliens or conspiracy theories!)
   
   
   
   
   prompt three
   (from the perspective of a 23 year old soldier in 1927)
                      i found god in the summer of 1927, sitting on a church pew somewhere between hope and desperation. he was falling apart at the seams, old, broken by a weight heavier than his own shoulders that he insisted on carrying himself. he did not notice me, bent over a bible older than time, he whispered prayers to himself asking for any life but his own.
                      when his pale eyes turned to me, i was struck by their weight. they were winding rivers and wandering roads that passed far beyond my knowledge of what was. when he spoke he told me in a voice low that flowed like streams over stones that i should not burn my heart out. told me to find one single truth that i knew to be right and plant it within myself. told me that i was born from ashes, but i would die among the stars.
                     he said he used to know many things: the worth of a man’s character in american dollars, the exact distance between my birth and my child’s last breath. but with a heavy heart he told me he no longer knew his own name, much less the wanderings of another man’s soul.
                     he has not returned. left the pew on a dusty august morning without looking back. i do not know where he went, or if he found himself. but i did. the world, it was not kind to his people in the coming years. it asked them to keep their children alive on sawdust and broken dreams, told a man that he was just another body lost to a war that was not his own. it commanded me to destroy myself, to rip out my humanity. to measure my worth in the number of bodies i has left in a field on a muddy shore rather than the truth that i knew.                                                                                                                 
                    but i found god in a church pew.
                    the world, it was wrong. because i saw that his freckles marked out the movements of the constellations. i saw sadness in his eyes that i could not bottle. eyes that told me of fields full of broken boys who did not know what they were fighting for. promised that i would be one of those boys.
   but there was hope in those eyes too.  a knowledge that the world was not broken but in the process of being built.  those eyes said that boys could be killed with hardship and warfare but humankind could not.
                    so tell the world that i found god in a church pew. tell them he was worth dying for.
   tell the world that god is not dead.