That Brand Still Burns Which Once Was Burned

Driven out from the Baptist church
Branded as homosexual
My absence left them in the lurch
To others less effectual
Since by this they deprived their choir
Of the benefits of my hire
My background was Republican
But it suited me not at all
I was a curious young man
Unsuited to their cramped and small
Solutions to larger questions

I questioned their explanation
And offered my own suggestions
Reaping righteous indignation
Culminating in expulsion
Cast out from the conservatives
With misdirected revulsion
Out to where the other half lives
This was when I was seventeen
I am surprised to still be here
Yet here I am now big as life
Those Baptists bound and gagged by fear

While in the interval between
I had three children had a wife
Became a German Lutheran
Liberal Democratic man
Concordia University
Full scholarship Class of 'Eighty-Two
The poet +Steven Curtis Lance
Quite harmless even useful to
Society for having learned
A lesson of intolerance
The hard way nor will I judge you

A silk purse made of sow's-ear me
By way of one hard lesson learned

That brand still burns which once was burned

+Steven Curtis Lance



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