To Satan in Heaven

 Time for a poem...
This is by Donald Justice – a plea for forgiveness addressed not to God but to Satan. Which might seem perverse, but isn't there something very approachable about Satan, something rather attractive and compelling, something indeed like us? It is certainly easier for us to recognise ourselves in him than in God. For all his ill doing, he is the undoubted hero of Paradise Lost (and, as William Booth observed, he had all the best tunes). As an incarnation of evil, I don't think he was ever very convincing, and the efforts of hellfire Christians to terrify believers with the prospect of eternal punishment were (are?) morbid, wrong-headed and probably owing more to Zoroastrianism and neurosis than to anything in Jesus's teachings. Or so it seems to me. But I digress. 
I love the image at the end of this subtle and supple poem, so unlike any other butterfly imagery in verse, where butterflies are invariably images of liberation, aspiration and transcendence, not weary creatures of downward yearning, wishing themselves back in the cocoon, or even caught in 'the looping net'. 

To Satan in Heaven

Forgive, Satan, virtue's pedants, all such
As have broken our habits, or had none,
The keepers of promises, prize-winners,
Meek as leaves in the wind's circus, evenings;
Our simple wish to be elsewhere forgive
Shy touchers of library atlases,
Envious of bird-flight, the whale's submersion;
And us forgive, who have forgotten how,
The melancholy who, lacing a shoe,
Choose not to continue, the merely bored,
Who have modelled our lives after cloud-shapes;
For which confessing, have mercy on us,
The different and the indifferent,
In inverse proportion to our merit,
For we have affirmed thee secretly, by
Candle-glint in the polish of silver,
Between courses, murmured amenities,
Seen thee in mirrors by morning, shaving,
Or head in loose curls on the next pillow,
Reduced thee to our own scope and purpose,
Satan, who, though in heaven, downward yearned,
As the butterfly, weary of flowers,
Longs for the cocoon or the looping net.