1.
Walking on this hill of graves and trees
I find the stone of Talitha beside the church
now only used to mark the spring’s return
of jonquils from the underworld. I stop to see
her stone beside her mom’s, on no-one’s map.
What bells that baby girl could surely laugh.
2.
A hundred-forty Easters since that war
spilled horses, cannon-deaf, upon our flowered town
and as she softly sang they simply rode her down.
Her blue eyes caked with dirt though never dewed
by love. Her ribbons tangled by the hooves
till opalescent pink died southern gray.
3.
What coquetries that girl will never play.
What precious blood she coughed as momma plied
her pleas into the jesus clouds, to stay.
No comforts could she ever take again
for Talitha is not. On these green heights
she wept grave-side into our modern nights.
4.
She tried her hymns of Jesus’ love, she tried
dear dying lamb thy precious blood, she tried
till all the ransomed church of God, she tried
around His pierced feet. She tried fair flow’rs
of paradise extend their fragrance sweet.
And what can make us whole again. She tried,
5.
but hymns were trampled under hymns brand-new
of gospels writ in burnished rows of steel
by fateful lightenings, watch fires, flaring lamps
and swords so terrible they even kill
the symbols. “Girl, I’d trade America for you”,
she swore among the evening damps and dews.
6.
“I’ll never birth unneeded things no more
to throw among the bosons bumping in the void
like horses red and randomed in a war.
Her blood united me with all the occamed world
in one credo, which in her end I swore:
Don’t ever birth unneeded things no more.”
7.
“I tried the hymns, but in the end I’ll go with blood.
The function of our cities is to not say “blood”.
But in our queen, our whore, in her is found the blood.
Beneath my feet I can’t not tread the blood
unfleshed, unflowered yet, unreckoned blood
in logics yet unmeshed until they graph the blood,
yet saved or damned by how they weight the blood,
yet dignified by how they sing the blood.”
8.
O what can make us whole again.
9.
The next of Jesus’ songs will split our homes,
erase that mona lisa from the moon’s white face
and startle straight the desultory flights of bats.
No more, this chapel, no, no more,
and no, no shovels chinking at the grave
nor April rains into the night. No night.
The next of Jesus’ songs will bugle dead
and they, in row on row, both blue and gray
will muster to the little girls, away
to courts of reckoning for all the bloods
of time. A river in a golden street.
Be sharp, my soul; be jubilant, my feet.
“Little girl, get up. Now let her eat.”
TimothyOne 