Building of a new church (1915)

Spring tears a strip of brown through the snow
And she swallows winter in greens
Her glare is intense and lingers
the slumbering she strips of their quilts
and those who have drawn the blind are refused comfort.

She is a tyrant, waking everyone in the house
She is like Ebenezer Scrooge
Punctual, incessant, exacting, merciless
Single-minded like a stone.

Spring came tearing in one Sunday after Church in 1915.
Punctual, merciless, incessant
raising roof and rafters, knocking out windows
untethering the air inside that ligered long over Bibles and Hymnals
untethering the air that slumbered on wooden pew and hung from banners
untethering like a dog whose collar stretched in a great argument with 100 cats

The dog off and gone forever, becoming an idea; a memory…only.
The old frame church became distant that day; reduced to…talk.
And spring, like Ebenezer Scrooge
Flinging the window open, and with unrestrained laughter.
Broadcasted this disturbance as a sign of new life!
She imagines life so narrowly; like a stone.

By the time the last load of red bricks arrived behind the sweating horses;
By the time the threshold was leveled out,
and the great wooden doors hung closed in their iron holsters spooning
the cool skin of a robust autumn
Spring had withdrawn like a mortal dictator.
Her torment faded like the old frame church had
when it slipped away seven months before.
Then on Sunday in December of 1915
The clergy in their black robes, glided to the communion rail,
with the children of the Most High stirring behind in joyful procession
until the mortar around the cornerstones was consecrated into a timeless
stillness
dreaming the church as one seamless stone
This Ebenezer imagined its December life as a stone of help,
a quiet holding where flesh could cling to its steady presence
a hermitage of the Eternal, and a rock for the sojourners to unfurl their lives upon.

Rev. Daryl Webber, B.A., M. Div.