The Callings

Sundays came a light that baptized
the warped, whitewashed boards of the Layman Church.
Inside it swirled along brown-yellow grain of benches
polished smooth by generation upon generation of backsides.
What stayed mundane was the sermon, big words
children had no need to understand
to enter the heaven of the sun.
How long-winded he was, Gawwdd,
boring, boring, boring rote out of the preacher's mouth
till you wanted him to swallow a fly –
I pinched my arm to stay awake.

But when the choir rose in their white blouses,
their singing whelmed through my lungs
like light through the tall blue golden stained windows,
I followed not the verses of the hymn,
but the hum of our voices as they flowed
out the oaken doors, over the rolling hills,
down the hollow and flashed across the creek
as dozens of dragonfly wings.

After the service, the women in their floral
polyester dresses, gossiped in knots
and old men uncomfortable in starched collars
gathered around beat-up pick-up trucks
splattered with the same red clay they came from,
spit long strings of tobacco juice and talked low
down in a way I leaned towards.

I edged away from the candied condescension
of the preacher and found my body released
to the field suddenly golden, all hallelujah
breaking loose as I ran and ran, and stood whirling still
surrounded by trees full of cicadas
rasping their seventeen year prayers
stoked by gusts of solar flares
that blessed also my face.

Falling to earth then,
I laid there below the head tall hay
a long while listening
to the sheer cartilage of grasshoppers clattering
aloft from stem to stem, to the dipsy doodles songs
that startled a mockingbird's throat
as if for the first time, to the green river unraveling
through the fat-leaved shade maples,
their upturned leaves of the breeze hosanna on high,
and closer, to the crickets burrowed under the dark soil
scraping the husks of their bodies wholly
into music – all those callings
I follow now, into that other world
from which this world grows,
into singing light.

Though we've been here
Ten Thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We've no less days
To sing God's praise