Lynn Powell

“Retired missionaries taught us Arts & Crafts each July at Bible Camp:
how to glue the kidney, navy, and pinto bean into mosaics,
and how to tool the stenciled butterfly
on copper sheets they'd cut for us.
At night, after hymns, they'd cut the lights and show us slides:
wide-spread trees, studded with corsage;
saved women tucking T-shirts into wrap-around batiks;
a thatched church whitewashed in the equator's light.
Above the hum of the projector I could hear the insects flick
their heads against the wind screens, aiming for the brightness of that Africa.

If Jesus knocks on your heart, be ready to say,
"Send me, O Lord, send me," a teacher told us
confidentially, doling out her baggies of dried corn.
I bent my head, concentrating hard on my tweezers
as I glued each colored kernel into a rooster for Mother's kitchen wall.

But Jesus noticed me and started to knock. Already saved,
I looked for signs to show me what else He would require.
At rest hour, I closed my eyes and flipped my Bible open, slid
my finger, ouija-like, down the page, and there was His command:
Go and do ye likewise—
Let the earth and all it contains hear—
Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut
down and thrown into the fire—.

Thursday night, at revival service, I held out through Trust and Obey,
Standing on the Promises, Nothing But the Blood, but crumpled
on Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling,
promising God, cross my heart, I'd witness to Rhodesia.
Down the makeshift aisle I walked with the other weeping girls
and stood before the little bit of congregation left
singing in their metal chairs.

The bathhouse that night was silent,
young Baptists moving from shower to sink
with the stricken look of nuns.
Inside a stall, I stripped, slipped my clothes outside the curtain,
and turned for the faucet—
but there, splayed on the shower's wall,
was a luna moth, the eye of its wings fixed on me.
It shimmered against the cement block:
sherbet-green, plumed, a flamboyant verse
lodged in a page of drab ink.
I waved my hands to scare it out,
but, blinkless, it stayed latched on.
It let me move so close my breath
stroked the fur on its animal back.

One by one the showers cranked dry.
The bathhouse door slammed a final time.
I pulled my clothes back over my sweat, drew
the curtain shut, and walked into a dark
pricked by the lightening bugs' inscrutable morse.”
― Lynn Powell, Old and New Testaments