Echo:
‘He didn’t understand me enough
Or he was lying to me’;
‘He wasn’t born from above
And I have had visions, you see’;
‘You’re in the power of Satan,
Whose delusions severely straiten.’
Science:
I walk in possession of the sun
That thaws the glaciers of theory,
The fleeting rays of speculation
Upon every factual query:
If those beams had no mandate to endow,
I would abandon my theory right now!
Echo:
‘I would abandon my theory right now,
But it’s a fancied high-flier to others,
As it leaps from the evidential bough
To the wing-beat plaudits of my brothers,
Happy, clappy to the rainbow,
As high as orthodoxy will go!’
Science:
I don’t stand aloof, like religion,
From upset in the fray of discovery!
By elevating the spiritual like a pigeon
To carefully nurtured mystery
Launching from Serpentine’s¹ edge,
It shows it doesn’t value knowledge!
¹The Serpentine River flows through Regent’s Park in London (pigeons are everywhere). But in a lampoon of religion “serpentine” can only mean “subtly tempting, wily, artful”. If Satan didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him.