Sunday morning
Sausage griddled on the stove
And spitting with the grease,
Asks your brother,
Wheat cake syrup ‘cross his nose
With butter for seasoning,
What good is the sun
Breaking the window pane
With colors rainbow bright
If you’re forgetting all
The misery that slunk
Through the city last night?
What good is the sun?
Glinting upon the road
Full of yesterday’s trash
The shattered bottle glass
And the shuttered house blight?
What good is the sun
Glimmering on orange peels.
Coffee grounds, desiccated
Blood from a wino fight?
Sunday morning
Priest slaving at the alter,
With his muttering and moaning,
His fish-food disk
His hair-shirt reparation.
Listen to his soul groaning,
How long is the hymn
That warbles through the church
From gowned chorale above
Where the man stretched out,
With arms on the wooden cross,
Goes begging for our love?
How long is the time
He hung upon this post
Until at last he ceased
And God’s pointed finger
Tore the cloud-hymen glove?
How long is the time
All the many people
Suffer lingering deaths
Upon this sucking mud?
Sunday morning
Preacher crying from pulpit,
Pointing at the staring eyes.
His purple robe
Has wide and flowing sleeves
So useful for swatting flies.
How very small are
The children at the church,
Who stand sweaty of hand.
The wisps of cooling air
Fail to reach to the place
In which the children stand.
How very small are
Those waiting for the air
The electric fan blows,
Sweating guilty water
Like baptismal founts.
How very small are
The children at the church,
Told their blackened souls
Will be cleansed at these shows.
Sunday at noon:
Lunch flapping betwixt the bread,
All rough crusted and wide pock-holed.
Brother’s milk glass,
Set across the table stead,
Has fallen over and rolled
Dripping wasted
Bread crumbles into rain
That bombards the dry floor.
Radio on the table
Will announce anxiously
The latest football score,
Dripping wasted
Energy of no portent
Not football, Human life
Waits for a chance to play.
The local team of poor.
Dripping wasted
Bodies still find a way;
Even though it’s Sunday,
To come and court the whore.
Sunday evening:
TV of obscene speakers
Promising earthly heaven.
Mock prayers spun
Each with it’s own golden helmet
For those of God’s elected.
We have a game!
Kickoff and they fight forward
And then they get pushed back.
We can hear where we are
When they shout God-knows-what.
At the one team that’s black,
We have a game!
Their uniform tattered
Yet they keep protesting,
Gaining some conversions,
Losing more to the goons
We have a game!
Their quarterback is hurt.
He is quickly dying
From the depth of his wounds.
Sunday evening:
With supper filled full of wine,
Decantered full with fine sin.
While we’re eating
We can view the poor outside
Staring at our garbage tin.
No Sidney Carton
Has stepped bravely forward
With lean and ready neck,
Some fated actor who
Volunteers sacrifice
In guillotined car wreck.
No Sidney Carton
In the cause of wasted youth.
No new Saint Lawrence has
Offered to be fried to
Become a martyr’s snack.
No Sidney Carton
To end all the bias.
Turning brown to white,
Turning white into black.
Sunday at night,
Dark slices the heart of light
And stomps down its foot heavy.
See four horses
In blankets of red and fright
With pestilences to lay.
Comes the dying
With its varied groaning,
With its screams about hate,
In its many faces,
Such as hooded bigot
From some old southern state
Comes the dying
Or the politician
From the smoke-filled old north,
So powerful and cruel
With the ballots of fate.
Comes the dying
And the whole of the world
With its festering wounds
Is crushed beneath its weight.
Monday morning
Starlight empty as eyeholes,
Both are cold and deafening.
Where’s your brother?
He is thinking of his soul,
Threatening and festering.
And so the song has slithered to a grim pale death.
Life ebbs slowly beneath like litter set adrift.
While the born blind poet sings songs to the born deaf.
In this unholy place nothing holy found left.
Illustration: Historic photo of Billy Sunday preaching.
