Children's Sermon
The
children are angry.
The story is too sweet,
too much about love, Jesus,
being kind to neighbors. No
prophet’s head offered
on a king’s platter like a giant
frightened apple. No one suffers
God’s wrath. No cities burn
to fine ash as sulfur slides
down heaven’s holy sluice
to drown the wicked. No one
grapples God to a draw. A woman,
(voice smooth as her pressed
flower-print skirt) displays pictures,
all the colors of children possible,
arranged on Jesus’ lap like strange
construction paper bouquets, faces
like cotton blooms tucked over
her prim legs. Adults laugh at restless
bodies, cringe as a stocky blonde boy
wanders behind the woman, so even-
toned and unaware, as he performs
practiced karate chops and forms
high kicks over her head. His mother
eyes him from the third pew; he grins,
kicks, grins, kicks, until she clears
the steps in a terrible blur to collect
him.
She contains his flailing limbs in a
sweep
of her long mother’s arms. He tries
to cry, but she smothers his voice
in her own flowered breast.
The children sit still.
They have glimpsed God’s mighty arms
filled with their brother, have seen
God’s
long reach. They believe God’s hands
could gather them up for good.—David Wright’s
poems and essays have appeared in The
Christian Century, The Mennonite, and
re:generation quarterly, among many
others. He teaches writing and literature
in the Chicago area.
From A Liturgy of
Stones (Telford, Pa.: DreamSeeker
Books, an imprint of Cascadia Publishing
House, 2002). Published here by
permission of author and publisher, all
rights reserved.
My
Friend at Firestone Asks About Poems
You
got any with forklifts in the middle?
Maybe some lines about solvents applied
to assembled tire beads or rubber coated
steel wire?
Or about treadstock, or how lunch tastes
at midnight when your nose and throat
burn black, your hands feel like green
tires,
waiting to be molded and cured? Anyone
write
how good a football game looks on Sunday
at eleven-thirty when you’ve come
off twelve-hours,
slept for three, maybe four, and settled
into a recliner, settled into three or
four High-Lifes
to watch a batch of ham fisted boys
batter themselves against a sodded field,
against other huge sons of bitches who
should be
throwing tires themselves if they
weren’t big
as Buicks? Got any stuff with layoffs
and new fishing boats on credit that,
dammit,
no one will take back because they
can’t be sold
anyway? Your poems got room for a
forklift,
a football game, unbreakable cement, new
solvents,
lunch at midnight, a place to recline?
—David Wright
From A Liturgy
for Stones (Telford, Pa.: DreamSeeker
Books, an imprint of Cascadia Publishing
House, 2003). Reprinted by permission of
author and publisher, all rights
reserved.
In
the Language of Dreams
Early
mornings I navigate sleep’s shore,
almost land, until a delinquent dream
appears like a watery hand and draws me
more
and more back to deep, deep heavenly
streams
where a waif of a child watches me and
sings
from a tree, a golden birch that grows
high
in the middle of a river. He swings
thin white arms through the wounded
morning sky,
keeps perfect four-four time to my
breath, breath,
breath, breath. His voice, richer than
his years,
echoes against my inner ear. "O
Death,"
he sings, "O Death." Of course
he shows no fear
as currents rise to his branch, reach his
chest.
A world waits, and wakes, just as waters
crest.
—David Wright
From A Liturgy
for Stones, (Telford, Pa.:
DreamSeeker Books, an imprint of Cascadia
Publishing House, 2004). Published here
by permission of author and publisher,
all rights reserved.
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