Faith

By Judy Loest b. 1947 Judy Loest

Leaves drift from the cemetery oaks onto late grass,

Sun-singed, smelling like straw, the insides of old barns.

The stone angel's prayer is uninterrupted by the sleeping

Vagrant at her feet, the lone squirrel, furtive amid the litter.

Someone once said my great-grandmother, on the day she died,

rose from her bed where she had lain, paralyzed and mute

For two years following a stroke, and dressed herself—the good

Sunday dress of black crepe, cotton stockings, sensible, lace-up shoes.

I imagine her coiling her long white braid in the silent house,

Lying back down on top of the quilt and folding her hands,

Satisfied. I imagine her born-again daughters, brought up

In that tent-revival religion, called in from kitchens and fields

To stand dismayed by her bed like the sisters of Lazarus,

Waiting for her to breathe, to rise again and tell them what to do.

Here, no cross escapes the erosion of age, no voice breaks

The silence; the only certainty in the crow's flight

Or the sun's measured descent is the coming of winter.

Even the angel's outstretched arms offer only a formulated

Grace, her blind blessings as indiscriminate as acorns,

Falling on each of us, the departed and the leaving.

Biography

Judy Loest, a Knoxville, Tennessee resident, was born in Virginia in 1947. She earned an MA in English from the University of Tennessee in 1998 and is the author of the chapbook After Appalachia (2007). A regular blogger, her work has been featured in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry column, on American Public Media’s On Being, and in the Poetry Society of America’s Poetry in Motion program on public transportation in the . . .

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