Jeff. St. Baptist Community at Liberty

Joe sings the Blues like he’s calling
his children home / a rich oak deep velvet swoon
with enough cry to bend your knees and not collapse.
He sang a sermon in his overalls and the church said
Amen. He took his coffee black until he met
Goatwalker cream and then he took two spoons.
We here, who make pews of folding chairs
and make the bread stretch around the block,
have called this meeting begun
by a reformed riverboat gambler
back when we called alcoholics drunkards
and later called in all those sleeping in the stockyards hay.
If I say too much, I might call the congregation awake,
all these rebel Southern Baptists who made it gay & misfit
and still call themselves, all these rich folks with empty pockets
and a leaky roof. What do you know of rising but what rose
down on Liberty St. the day God said let there be light and it poured.
I tell you, the Phoenix burned smiling for all we can make of ash.
The city comes for us flaming and eats itself to the marrow,
finds men sleeping in Sunday school rooms and rages,
spread Clarksdale out across the city and left an empty lot,
where half of us still sits waiting for the grand return.
When the Association expelled us from Jeff St.
for holding a woman pastor behind the pulpit,
we took an old factory building and made it hold us all
by the hand of an angel mechanic called Elmer,
and kept our name, too, but longer. Ate with the whole line
on 10 for 10 biscuits and eggs right next to Norma’s House
after the steel fist in a velvet glove woman called Mary
came and asked us what were we here for anyway.
I tell you, you haven’t seen a party til Easter at Jeff. St.
when we dance on confetti just to see the mess splayed
and Di sneaks us the best piece. Gather us in,
where the prayer drums an open forum
of children too wild-eyed to call God Mister.