Acts of Faith - edit

[dukealien]

If I’m interpreting this correctly, it is about the tribe of people who mistook aircraft for Gods and made a religion of it. That being said, I like the ideas that are floating around in this. It seems like you could be critiquing modern materialism if S2 is read sarcastically, but it could also just be noting the differences in culture. It also highlights the different perspectives that different cultures produce. We see the cargo as simply cargo, whereas they see it as Cargo; something sacred. Quite big ideas packed in essentially two short stanzas. I’m not sure if this makes any definitive statement, so if that was your intention you may want to add something less vague, or elaborate on why we ridicule them, and whether or not that is warranted. But overall a good poem. Thanks.

Quite frankly, I'm not sure of a definitive, exact direction intended either when this was written or now.  Your interpretation is at least as good as mine.

A few thoughts, though, might include, (1) two tribes of materialists, one of which sacrifices much and gets nothing, the other gets plenty but must constantly have more (see Chief Red Cloud on the subject), and/or (2) the islanders' faith in the ultimate value of the Cargo is matched by ours, to the extent that, like them, we keep performing the rituals even though they're so efficacious, for us, that we're running out of places to store our blessings after our prayers (you know, those orders to Amazon and eBay) are infallibly answered.