Randel McCraw Helms
Sunday Morning
To awake at a waft of bacon,
The perk and sizzle of Sunday kitchen
And the intoxicating tang of grease
That thickened the riches of coffees,
Was a taste of church before church began.
Sunday breakfast—no Mass-fast for this crowd:
Fuel! Fuel! a snowy trudge to holiness.
And then, to see the Father still glad
With communion wine from an early Mass
And serving us bits of Christ on a tray
In the brilliance of light through colored glass
Was worth every slip in the snow on the way.
Sunday morning in our neighborhood:
When God wasn’t dead and the rock still stood.
Randel McCraw Helms is retired from Arizona State University’s English Department. Making poems is his lifelong vice, and his recent work has appeared in such places as Young Ravens, Blood & Bourbon, and Silkworm.
To awake at a waft of bacon,
The perk and sizzle of Sunday kitchen
And the intoxicating tang of grease
That thickened the riches of coffees,
Was a taste of church before church began.
Sunday breakfast—no Mass-fast for this crowd:
Fuel! Fuel! a snowy trudge to holiness.
And then, to see the Father still glad
With communion wine from an early Mass
And serving us bits of Christ on a tray
In the brilliance of light through colored glass
Was worth every slip in the snow on the way.
Sunday morning in our neighborhood:
When God wasn’t dead and the rock still stood.
Randel McCraw Helms is retired from Arizona State University’s English Department. Making poems is his lifelong vice, and his recent work has appeared in such places as Young Ravens, Blood & Bourbon, and Silkworm.