Scripture
Jesse Millner



Last Friday at my dad’s funeral at St. Mark’s Methodist,
I saw folks I hadn’t seen since I went away to college
forty years ago, and they were more beautiful with age,
more astonishing in their eighties, still holding on
to that old-time religion, believing my dad was already
in heaven. When my sweet aunt Janie and I talked
about the by-and-by, she cited a verse from Proverbs
about rediscovering in old age what we’d
lost in youth.  And I thought about Sundays long ago
at this very church when I never doubted God
and truly believed how I’d be reunited with everyone
I loved in heaven where Jesus’s mansion has many rooms
and one of them was for me.  When I was young

I loved the woods and fields, loved my grandparents,
loved the way the southern moon rose most nights
in a clear black sky.  I was a still a child so I heard
the natural world humming with June bugs,
crickets, the wind filling the forest with secrets
as I walked past brown creeks with high red clay
banks looking for the next thing, the next arrowhead,
the next crucifix of white bird bones, the next tiny
cave dug beneath a red oak tree signaling a possum
or black snake, or some other creature that
found solace in the darkness. Maybe it’s time
to become nocturnal myself and search this strange
place I’ve landed for clues about the old gods
and ghosts that still wander the dark woods,
how sacred the quiet they leave in their paths,
how beautiful the cry of a whip-poor-will,
itself a tiny spirit singing hymns I long
to whisper along with, a believer myself
in the scripture, a wanderer in the greatest cathedral.
I want to sing with the birds, but only at night
when most are silent and prayerful and only
the lonely sing sorrowful tunes towards the sky.


 

About the author:
Jesse Millner’s work has appeared most recently in The Florida Review, Real South Magazine, The Apeiron Review, Sweet, and Best American Poetry 2013. He teaches writing courses at Florida Gulf Coast University and lives in Fort Myers with his wife, Lyn, and dog, Henry Brown.