American Revival
By: Walter Stepanenko
Tags: Christianity, Progressive Christianity, Religion And Spirituality, Poetry

“Stairway and Tree” Gertrude Abercrombie

A look back on 2020 and a poetic journey into the heart of America and the truth in the soil

Prologue

She says,

“I want to know if you can see in the dark

If you can root out the negative thoughts

​With love”

Part I

I was dead when they found me

Bone dry in a timeless melody

The Fitzgerald sinking through the film of pulmonary hurt

Carry my casket to Cleveland

Sing your soul across the lake

I want to wake up a jazz scribe in Memphis

A pentatonic retreat to a Pentecost revival

Broken bread with the valkyrie mountain

Shakin’ like the blues was just born in the field with my people

Shutter with the wolves as they howl in the mornin’

I was dead when they found me

Reverb through the tube of the Marshall cabinet

Echo transmitting the static of an HG Wells novella

Subway panic and the old alumnus

Carry my casket to New Orleans

Raise me over the sight line of the broken levees

I want to rain on a Texas drought

Sing me into the rays of a shotgun wedding

Tattoo on your side of a Bible verse

Rust iron homeland of a forgotten oil baron

Shoutin’ hallelujah with the sky and the birds

I was dead when they found me

The foiled treasure of the California gold rush

Wine drunk on the Spirit and the metaphysical poets

Elise Cowen and the trail that leads north

Carry my casket to Concord

Sow my ashes into the patterns of the spiral vineyards

I’ve seen a dream bigger than the Hollywood billboard

A stone baptism in a one-room schoolhouse in Buena Vista Valley

Cemetery plot of an unincorporated hamlet

The poetry pages of a satellite love letter

The red of the desert and the fear of the Lord

I was dead when they found me

The weathered ruins of the arch of St. Louis

The tumbleweed garden of the Oklahoma panhandle

The specter of a sequestered belle in a Faulkner hotel

Writing psalms of children holding sparklers

Amongst the red glare backdrop of the bass of ballad covers

Only to greet the teenage wasteland of a Sylvia Plath funhouse

Carry my casket to Newark

Read me the pipe organ gospel of Jackson Street Bridge

I want to see where the centurion ships used to dock and float in

And when the temple is torn from top to bottom

You’ll know then that you found the place

Tarry toward the fount valhalla

Now burning in thy heart aflame

Part II

My father taught me

To listen to the land

To sit up straight in church

To be kind to the birds

He said,

“Every creature has a place in heaven

When bad men find kindness in their hearts

And no one’s good who thinks they’re good

And nothing really important is ever said with words”

So when the rains came

Washed out the villas

He left the school

To rebuild the farms

And when long nights and no supper

Turned to fever dreams

Pneumonia coughs

He said,

“See son,

There’s the wind

And love

There’s always

The wind and love”

We burned him

In the garden

Reading Ginsberg

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

And there in the embers

As a train howled in the distance

Rattling the dirt

Shaking the sparrows from their perches

​

I knew

Part III

Here I build thy cathedral

In the glory of thy will and people

In the girls who wake up half an hour early

Straighten their hair in the mirror

Dream of roses and limousines

Here I build thy cathedral

In Youngstown, Ohio

In furloughed workers dialed into AM radio

Thrown backs and elbow grease

Dreams of good jobs and grandkids and judgment day

Here I build thy cathedral

In third floor apartment electric piano

In heartbroken teenagers rehearsing spirituals

Canceled prom nights and virtual graduations

Dreams of yesterday and the evanescent spring

Here I build thy cathedral

In the field tests of a makeshift hospital

A stranger’s prayers and flowers

Vaccine dreams and visiting hours

So with this I anoint you reader

A mouthpiece for all believers

Hymnal book redeemers

The soil sings to you

Know now the bones

Of abolitionist preachers

The steel of inventers

First death of sinners

Hear me resonators

Suffragette healers

Auditory seers

We are acoustic keys of pine trees

Planted along rivers

​

Children of sediment and time

Cherokee myths and someone else’s vines

The seeds of forever and the sky