You Owe Me

What thoughts I have of You tonight, God.
You protect me and You make giant waves
And wash people away. You owe me.
You make the tornados that suck
Up the people and move them to another dimension.
You lift every rock in the whole wide universe and throw them
At the people who try to hit me.

God, I see You playing video games in my room.
You're young, with shiny eyes like mine.
You have a little beard and You play the
Games without using controls
Because You can. Because You
Can fly without wings. You 
Can use magic and make balls of fire and lightening.
God, You are powerful and I am a cell
Compared to you.

This is one of the most beautiful poems I've ever read. It was written anonymously by a ten year old boy dying of cancer and preserved in Miah Arnold's moving essay, "You Owe Me," about her work as a creative writing teacher in a juvenile cancer treatment center. It reminds me of the psalms. So arresting. I want it, I want it in a sermon someday. 

"What use," I whispered, cried for no one in the world to hear, for no one but my soul, as though the words would rid it of the final burden of guilt, and I found myself a child agin, the years shed as a snake sheds its skin, and I was sanding over the awkward tangle of clothes and limbs. "What use, what use, what use..." and no one answered, not the body in the road, not the hawk in the sky or the beetle in the earth; no one answered.-- James Welch, Winter in the Blood

"The more he talked to the floor the more he nodded. It was a though the floor were talking back to him, grave words that kept him nodding gravely"-- James Welch, Winter in the Blood 

"I at length became ambitious to find a family whose cabin had not been entered by a Methodist preacher... I traveled from settlement to settlement, but into every hovel I entered I learned that the Methodist missionary had been there before me"-- ca. 1800's Presbyterian missionary

"Nobody was out but crows and Methodist preachers"-- ca. 1800's popular saying