On Sundays

On Sundays

we donned our church clothes,

white shirts and ties, dresses freshly pressed,

our shoes polished and paraded ourselves

into the sanctuary and to the pew on the left side,

half way down, where we’d always sat, Dad and Mom

and us, and our grandparents, too. This was our self-

assigned pew as was much of the church folks’ choosing,

each to his own place in the Baptist Church we grew up in.

It was a place of order and rigid rules to govern us,

to keep us out of the fiery pits of hell, a long

litany of “thou shalt nots,” though we wanted to,

perhaps even did, secretly holding hands with a girl

under a shared Bible, or a “damn” let faintly fly,

hoping our parents wouldn’t find out, wouldn’t see

through our angelic guilt and shame radiating,

or that God Himself was too busy to notice us,

Baptist bred and the least of His concerns

in an evil world. Our place in heaven was surely secured

by our attendance these Sunday mornings, suitably attired

and, hands folded in prayer, dutifully sitting quietly,

attentively, in the family pew, except for the snort

and wheezing coming from my grandfather, a saintly man

baptized and unafraid of an angry God passing judging

for the sin of hard work and a Sunday morning nap,

softly snoring in the good Lord’s house.