Grace Church, Yorktown

Still, colored shadows. It is not
The building that is still, but we
Who stand at twilight by the red-
Stained walls, eroded to curves,

Yet changed by the same hands
That laboriously cut and

Shaped convenient rectangles of
Marl, the leavings of unbelieving
Creatures, accumulated through
The passage, heat, and pressure of years.

The shells, once articulate, bivalve
Dissolving to blunt rock, made the walls

Sufficient to have stayed, but we have
Not the faith to keep them as they
Were placed, through the fallow years
The yard destroyed as the walls.

Blocks, though brown, are red in the
Light of certain sun, like we who shall pass.


By David King
The sixth poem from Virginia Churches, a series of 8 poems on colonial churches.

Copyright 2004 by David King.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry 360 with permission of the author.

St. John’s Chuckatcrk

Between the roads, among the trees.
Twisting in a course above the
Green scummed pond that lies,

Has lain, the centuries, the circle
Of water persists from vapor
To piercing drops that fall upon

Us who live. The faith, too, lives
In our minds as in the English
Bond that stays as it was known,

Then the only force solidity.
Six by one and ten lives thick, the
Faith considered permanent as

Clay borrowed from the river’s edge
Convenient for use and dried
In sunlight by the stalking wheat

And reflecting pond, waiting for
The faith to place each course
With faultless line and enduring love.


By David King
The fifth poem from Virginia Churches, a series of 8 poems on colonial churches.

Copyright 2004 by David King.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry 360 with permission of the author.

Glebe Church

Repointed arches, one door, and the
chuff chuff of a tractor on the glebe,
not the dray of horses. To speak
with a voice more suddenly my own.

As silently as time can whippet,
swallows wicker on the evening air.
Return to brick, few remain
between directions of modernity.

Though plumb and fast, square at least
upon one corner, little is
placed where they left it, matchlocks
and steel plows against the wilderness.

Is it less now, when we have made
a monument and token for
ourselves among the spoken walls
and, redolent of singing, choir?

Once fallen, are they the less, so
laboriously as they were piled,
sunlight angled on the mortar
stippling a prayer to evening?

Is this past dead, or do we have
in it a vision of a purer
arch, completed rondel, and a
firmer door like the faith that was?




By David King
The fourth poem from Virginia Churches, a series of 8 poems on colonial churches.

Copyright 2004 by David King.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry 360 with permission of the author.

Yeocomico

Upon the road a crosstie lies
the product of a deeper yearning
than that of flesh which labored it.
Each one put upon his hand the

holiness of clay, more pure than
nightjar’s calls across repointed
furnishing that now remain, where
two roads cross among the furrows.

The looming square of transcept
and crossing at an angle mark
more firm along the coming dark
the certitudes of simple faith.

So they loved who were the body
of a surer time of soul, who
knew corruption in its forms more
quietly than we imagine

flesh decays and swells to light. Yet
the mind was stronger and the wall
elected with a calmer hand
than we who name it can invent.



By David King
The third poem from Virginia Churches, a series of 8 poems on colonial churches.

Copyright 2004 by David King.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry 360 with permission of the author.