David W. Landrum

Corporate

No liturgy, no beatific light
will bring you to me, since you would be chaste
as ice and lie alone in bed at night,
seeing a vision that will bring to waste
your beauty. But a cloistered world, serene
and silent, or a place or holiness
is quite unlike the vision you have seen.
You at the top with nothing to confess
but your ambition and drive to succeed —
this is your true religion, what you kneel
before. It is the scripture that you read,
your burning bush, the breathlessness you feel.
The corporate ladder you negotiate —
this is your needle's eye, your narrow gate.

David W. Landrum’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Pulsebeat. He has two collections out: The Impossibility of Epithalamia and Tawney Grammar.