Though cranes and bulldozers came, <br />yanked free marble and creek stones <br />like loose teeth, and then shovels <br />unearthed coffins and Christ's <br />stained glass face no longer paned <br />windows but like the steeple, <br />piano, bell, and hymnals <br />followed that rolling graveyard <br />over the quick-dying streams, <br />the soon obsolete bridges— <br />they still congregated there, <br />wading then crossing in boats <br />those last Sunday nights, their farms <br />already lost in the lake, <br />nothing but that brief island <br />left of their world as they lit <br />the church with candles and sang <br />from memory deep as water <br />old hymns of resurrection <br />before leaving that high ground <br />where the dead had once risen.<br /><br />Ron Rash<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/last-service/
