Читать книгу Kindest Regards - Ted Kooser - Страница 26

The Red Wing Church

There’s a tractor in the doorway of a church

in Red Wing, Nebraska, in a coat of mud

and straw that drags the floor. A broken plow

sprawls beggar-like behind it on some planks

that make a sort of roadway up the steps.

The steeple’s gone. A black tar-paper scar

that lightning might have made replaces it.

They’ve taken it down to change the house of God

to Homer Johnson’s barn, but it’s still a church,

with clumps of tiger lilies in the grass

and one of those boxlike, glassed-in signs

that give the sermon’s topic (reading now

a birdnest and a little broken glass).

The good works of the Lord are all around:

the steeple top is standing in a garden

just up the alley; it’s a henhouse now:

fat leghorns gossip at its crowded door.

Pews stretch on porches up and down the street,

the stained-glass windows style the mayor’s house,

and the bell’s atop the firehouse in the square.

The cross is only God knows where.