The Fiddler of Driskill Hill: Poems

North Louisiana Country Church in Flames

 North Louisiana Country Church in Flames Bienville Parish, the mid-1950s Late Christmas Eve and now long hours begin For a boy whose mother’s welcome hearthside kiss Closes old tales of no room at the inn And leads to dreams of lighted trees and this: A sleep disturbed by strangely glittering gifts Waiting under the bubble-candled fir, Then by a wind that through a cracked pane lifts Curtains the faint smoke-traces lace and stir. The child in time awakens, sniffs, and peers Blearily through the window toward a flame Climbing far steeple-timbers till his fears And eyes fix on a church’s gleaming frame. The rest his roused grandfather, whom he’d tell, Related hours after when the splash Of dawn-light drenched the still flickering hell Where tongues unnumbered babbled in the ash. Stunned deacons first crushed-in the smoldering doors Meeting a Red Sea blazing in the nave Uncrossable to reach those Jordan shores Beyond the scalded baptistry’s raised wave. Then bearing lists of weddings, births, and deaths, One dashed by the pastor’s study and the choir, Glimpsing the pulpit Bible’s dragon breaths, Its Book of Revelation laved in fire. The smoke-choked deacons stumbled out for air As winds took up the holocaust that spread Under spiked railings’ incandescent glare To lay its pall of flame upon the dead. And as those gathered watched each cindered grave Glowing below a stone’s seared name and date, The church’s crackling rafters cracked and gave In to the great cremation uncreate.  That yuletide night no cows or oxen knelt, No cocks crowed evil spirits well away, And no one knew what then a child had felt Walking those charred foundations Christmas Day. Yet there beside a melted cross and bell Clutching his gift, a book of tales, the boy First saw that world in which each man must dwell, Aeneas bearing Vesta out of Troy. ...