The scruffy theology

     students, all thin, are passionately young

and thunder with studious

     confidence on behalf of the clear

inarguability

     of apophaticism. Inordinately carefree,

sprawled in emphatic languor,

     they punctuate their oral scholia

with thumbs pinched to forefingers

     as if they held invisible pencils.

They inflect their scriptural

     citations

with the shifting implicit

     italics of seasoned

exegetes. Have they never

     doubled back and doubted a word

or felt in their throats the barb

     of a broken promise? They drop

God’s names, human and divine,

     casually, like a celebrity’s, handling them

easily as bars of soap,

     and whenever some incorrigible one

risks a joke, no matter how

     funny nor who laughs, at least one other

must look off in the distance

     with wistful disapproval due

to the verifiable

     fact—attested to in multiple

canonical passages,

     granted authority by theological

fathers with impeccable

     credentials—

that God laughs only in scorn,

     a verdict too half-hearted by half and one

at which God, whether it be

     from wisdom or mercy, must laugh.