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Some time ago, I was advised---by a self-styled expert on internet publishing and communication; whose authority I apparently had no right to question---that I should remove all of my Christian/Scriptural poems from postpoems.  When I asked the reason for doing so (and this was an academic question; I had not intention of removing any of them, regardless of how often this expertise was reiterated by the advisor), he explained that in places where Christianity was either illegalized or outrightly persecuted, people who read my poems surreptitiously might run afoul of censors, or internet monitors, possibly resulting in the persecution, imprisonment, or even execution of those readers.  On the basic of that possibility, he insisted, I was morally obliged to remove the poems that might offend someone resident in one of those oppressive countries.

    The poems in question remain; and will remain so as long as postpoems continues.  And I have plans to expand them.

    And even if I was not a Christian (God forbid!); even if I no longer believed (no chance of that:  I will always need a Savior); but even without Faith, I would post the poems if only for the damned spite of it.  I prepared from January 1, 1973 to sometime in August, 1994, before I ever published a word; I published in print venues, all of them very small (D&D Publications, an amateur firm, was my first publisher), until the internet finally got to me in 2001.  

    I joined postpoems on December 5, 2001, after encountering severe editorial restrictions at the Starlite Cafe.  Editorial restrictions, historically, at very nearly suppressed T. S. Eliot's first published poem, The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, and had resulted in the surgical mutilation of Wallace Stevens' great poem, Sunday Morning.  Each of these Poets, both of whom I have long studied, refused to submit to subsequent similar conditions once the reputation of each of them had been established.  Fortunately and thankfully, for all of us at postpoems, the administrator---our publisher---does not impose such restrictions and intrusions upon us.  (Thank you, Jason!)

    I consider those of my poems that were questioned by the expert to be not only poems but testimonies of our Faith.  We are required, by Christ Himself, to proclaim our belief and our personal experiences without regard to consequences . . . for ourselves or for those who might believe because of the witness we bear to the Gospel.  Consdiering the untold thousands of Christians who were martyred by Nero, Decious, and Diocletian---should those who first shared the Faith with the Martyrs in Rome and elsewhere have refrained from that activity because it might bring unpleasant consequences to those who listened to, or read, their words?

    The poems shall remain.  The expert has not contacted me for some time.  I hope the country of his residence---which is not the USA---has not taken action against him for sharing his expert and deeply experienced opinion with some ordinary Christian in a small town in the MidWest of these United States.

Starward