At A Meeting At The Rock Springs Revival

Joshua Martin

Somewhere off the main highway
there is a town clamped down in the throats
of a “repentance or hell” dictum,
a town pressed against a copse of thicket bushes, 
with just enough space for a dusty inroad
to lumber towards a warping oak pulpit.
And so they’ve assembled like fence-posts,
pulled downward into fresh mud
to meet the Divine
in hastily-erected tents supported
by splintered wooden beams. In preparation,
Southern theologians have crafted time travel
devices out of porch swings, and so sons and daughters
and fathers and mothers swing backwards through
time into apple pie laced kitchens and fly-swatted
stables, past clearings of beer bottles shattered
by .22 rounds, into an open field where a bible salesman
shakes the scripture in his right hand,
his left channeling the ghosts of Rock Springs, North Carolina, August, 1851.Where they stand in time and place,
a dead horse speckled with houseflies lays in a field made fallow
by a congregation’s unrelenting marching,
their necks crow-bent in a plea for salvation.
For this is the third month of the cloud-choked dryness
and the air has thatched with thistle,
and the bones of their cattle have
scratched holes into their loosening hides,
and the preacher has tugged at his neck collar
for what seems like an eternity now,
still having no words for that which festers under the
parched lands of the faithful
who have long since run out of prayer.