The Land of God

[Photo Credit: Calvina Nguyen, @calvina and @yourbrandspark]

This is something I wrote years ago after visiting a tee-shirt factory in Kolkata. Women from the largest red-light district in Asia leave their jobs as sex workers to work there. Everyone is paid the same living wage regardless of skill. They are given savings and retirement accounts and free childcare is provided on site. They begin the day with Scripture and end it with reflection and fellowship. More than anything, the women I observed were having the time of their lives – working hard but enjoying each other’s company and drowning in the beautiful spirit that saturated the place.

I called this poem “The Land of God,” which I adapted from the topic that Jesus preached most about: God’s kingdom.

I wondered if the Land of God was fictitious
Like Atlantis and risen Elvis
Something only for the superstitious
This, yeasty, feasty, blessed be the leasty, glorious Land of God

Tucked away in a Kolkata bustee
Where ten thousand women stand for sale in a line as in a vending machine
Alongside brothels of rusty tin and dusty skin and lusty men
I stumbled upon it, fumbled upon it, crumpled upon it

I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise
Jesus said the sex workers were entering the Land of God ahead of everybody else
The rich are left to press their camels through needle eyes
All the while the Land of God is filling up with throw away, stow away, skidrow away people

God has kissed the earth upon a textile mill
Humming with machines clattering and women chattering
Laughing like those who’ve got the will
To break free of accusation, into immigration, gaining liberation

In this grungy, tee-shirt factory, Land of God, everybody is paid the same
The skilled seamstress and the scrap sweeper, who started just today
She's learning disabled and her right foot is lame
And poverty’s anesthetic has stolen her prophetic poetic without apologetic

In God’s land daycare is free

A place kids learn to count and spell and to be four again
Though they sometimes act out with innocent naiveté
The sexual contextual without full consentual, like they used to see those men doing to mama

This hot and sweaty place on the edge of centeredness
Women of a certain disposition, who have been glared at or winked at
Are finally wed to a prince and treated with tenderness
By the One who traded his rapport for their deplore

I have never been in a place with more hope, more light-hearted levity
Full of life in every way you can imagine possible 
Where trials and griefs pass with bitter brevity
And the immunity of community drowns in opportunity

Life is being lived in a Kolkata slum without this world's malignity
And I’m quite certain Jesus lives and laughs and works
Alongside women who have been plundered of their dignity
Who've shod the façade of poverty’s fraud in the beautiful Land of God