The Pentecostals, 1948

Week after week
they climbed their six splintered
pentecostal stairs to dance
like wonderful trained
bears, climbing, falling,
singing, their hands that ordinarily
held books or washed babies
or sometimes counted out money
to pay the milkman,
clapping,

clapping joy
as if they held tambourines,
laughing, their eyes lit
with some inner glory like a fire:

Oh holy, holy, they sang
and tossed their heads to a strong
upbeat rhythm. Oh brother, oh sister,
Oh holy, their housekeys jangling
in their pockets, their coins jingling
as the plate was passed.

What would I have dropped
that summer night--absolved--into their plate
as they danced, howling their songs
holy, and more holy, like a circus troupe,
but my ignorance, an offering of
my two dazed eyes,
my pious, stunned tongue,
my baseball,
my cap pistol and a red roll of caps,
a white Life Saver, and
four glass black marbles still warm
from my hand?

Outside
under the glass-black sky and looking in
at their window, it was awesome,
and I wished I knew the words.


Daddy loved boxing, and baseball. I remember listening with him to the radio broadcast of the fight for the Heavyweight Championship when Rocky Marciano beat the World's champion Jersey Joe Wolcott. We listened to a lot of boxing matches and a lot of baseball games on the radio. In the summers, both my dad and my brother played baseball with our local team. Both of them pitched. And sometimes my dad was umpire. The whole town turned out for the games, except on the nights when the Pentecostal's held their church meetings. Then, a few friends and I would sneak away from the game and look in the windows at the people inside singing and praying and sometimes speaking in tongues.