Moon at Half Past Noon

The meeting was called in a neutral, stark space,
To settle the title to Heaven and Grace.
For millennia, arguments, fervent and grand,
Had circled the question of who held the land.

A council of gods, from all times and all places,
With stony, immortal, and frustrated faces.
Brahma looked weary. Odin checked on his ravens.
Vishnu preserved a polite, distant expression.
Zeus flexed a thunderbolt, brimming with tension.
And Yahweh proclaimed, “By My Will, it is Mine!”
A thousand more deities stood in the line.

The air crackled with power, with ego and pride,
Each cosmos-creator had nowhere to hide.
To fight would be chaos, to rend the great sky,
An end to all things, with no reason why.

Then Ganesh, the scribe, with his pen and his scroll,
Who’d been quietly taking the bureaucratic toll,
Cleared one of his throats and he tactfully said,
“Esteemed Makers, the living, the already-dead…
This quarrel is pointless. It’s perfectly clear
The system we’re using is flawed and austere.
We’re fighting for ownership, title and deed,
When the fundamental and practical need…
Is not who owns it, but who does the work,
A solution to make the whole system perk.”

A murmur went ‘round. It was logical, calm.
It proposed a new, corporate, celestial psalm.
“A joint venture!” Thor boomed. “A shared, divine trust!”
“An Authority!” Everyone agreed. “It is just.”

So the contract was signed with a star-flurry pen,
To manage the souls of all women and men.
No one god would own it. The fighting was done.
They’d share the overhead, the profits, the sun.
And thus, the new Afterlife Authority had begun.