New Covenant Bound

Exile

53 Exile Sunset’s coat of many colors fades out over Hebron Ridge line of electric pylons great scarecrows marching south out of Gilbertsville down into Harmony and Stowe and into Tennessee. Smoke from the fire I’ve built rises like my shadow, released, casting its body below. And all I can see before me is the thin web of lines in my hand and my hand — Hope Everlasting etched in my left Loss Evermore in my right. Night is the quiet closing of the two together like tired wings as we learn to pray the prayer of our fathers: O give light give light or take back the darkness 54 for thine is the kingdom and the power but ours is the line of torches moving slowly down to the river. 55 " We were amongst the last to leave. We hadn’t meant to be. But they had found no place to move us to. The crossing was at Oldham Ferry. Not but two miles, but it was the longest trip I ever took. Everything we owned in the world tied up on the back of a truck. The countryside looked like the day after Judgment. Houses gone, burnt down to ashes. The ones still standing, dark and hollow as a skull bone. Graves in the churchyard were yawning open and left empty. The woods looked like a stubblefield, timber piled for burning. Fields unplowed and unplanted, just raw places on the land. We made the landing by late afternoon. The last we saw of home was off the back of that ferryboat, the sun going down red over Hebron Ridge, us straining to make out Bethel Grove one more time by last light. ...