Matthew 19:14
after Jericho Brown
for the camp girls
Heaven belongs to such as these,
your apostle taught us, Lord –
therefore, let me not forget those six Junes
of girlhood summers down
that two-lane highway, left – past
the seven-foot, plastic Hereford bull
at Clearwater Junction, dreaming under
cast-off army tents where forty-miles-away
might’ve been a different country, those
faraway towns’ names exotic:
Philipsburg, Frenchtown,
Wisdom, Choteau —
and bless those mouths red with praise
and Fla-Vor-Ice from the canteen.
Give me to singing, as we did,
rise and shine and give God the glory,
glory waiting for the supper bell
outside the mess tent where counselors
decreed: the last shall be first
and the first shall be last
and we all turned ‘round in line
‘cause we believed
that one day it’d be true,
so Lord forget us not in our hour
of need: those who fished trashed Kool-Aid cups
to tear into visions of the Blessed
Virgin, who stole change from Right to Life
to buy ring pops for our little sisters.
Bless us, Lord, we dirt-road orphans, grown now
as we are and miles from the closest home:
women-once-girls named for virtues
mothers hope’d we’d hold true:
Faith, Joy, and daughter after daughter
called Mercy.
Elegy for Daylight
Midsummer’s 10 o’clock dusk had us
ditching swings, twisty slide ’n jungle
gym for the beyond: boneyard, field, forest,
the mountain ash’s galaxy of orange berries –
stinging hard as BBs if you knew how
to put a spin on ‘em. Ducking behind
gutted-out combines ‘n coils of chicken wire,
we counted each scrape ‘n scab testament
to grit, tough shit, truth
or consequence – scraped up
seed potatoes with sticks ‘n fingernails
fooling ourselves they were gold enough
to buy our way out of town. As night tucked in,
our harvest turned
to dirt-clod fights: o how
a little spit and dirt
could make some mud
could hide a stone
could hide a bruise
as if to say, witness here
our skin
welted but unbroken –
Author Statement
Though I practice my faith much differently now from when I was a child, I’m still haunted by the songs, prayers, and scriptures that immersed my evangelical upbringing in rural towns in the Mountain West. These poems lean into fragments of those texts to revisit and explore the physical and spiritual landscapes (which I think are closely intertwined) of those communities and the tensions between the impulses that shaped them – for example, between violence and tenderness, stoicism and sentimentalism, self-reliance and belief in divine providence. These poems are also an attempt, in part, to revise, reframe, and sometimes subvert these texts to ask how they can speak to me now. Perhaps, in a way, they are prayers themselves–intercessions on behalf of the child I was then, struggling to make sense of my experience of the divine.
Leah Silvieus is the author of a chapbook, Anemochory (Hyacinth Girl Press), and the recipient of awards and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, Kundiman, VONA, and US Poets in Mexico. She also serves as books editor for Hyphen Magazine and holds an MFA from the University of Miami. You can visit her at leahsilvieus.com.