A SHORT PROSE POEM 

Delbert Mahew had been an avowed Pentecostal since he was three, although at that age his grandmother had to make the promises for him, but by the time he was eight he had read the Bible straight through, and could talk in tongues on those nights the Holy Spirit took over his scrawny body and wracked it with awe and guilt, although it is difficult for a child this age to properly sin.  But he asked for forgiveness and was delivered, for by the time he was twelve he had grown to preaching, his tinny voice screeching out the verses and the curses against all vexations of the Devil.

He did not flinch nor turn away but testified with great will and might against the widow Gehman who had been caught on a Saturday night allowing that drunkard Walt Benhagen to climb through her bedroom window, and she was shunned.  When he was fourteen his voice began to crack and slip into the registers of the man he would become, and he abandoned school for it would not serve him further. 

He prayed that the Lord Almighty would rescue him from the heat of his own body and he took to working on his grandfather’s farm during the day, feeding the pigs and the old boar Belzul, lifting heavy bales of wheat chaff and hay, bending his back to the plow, to exhaust out the temptations.  All the night long, except for an hour or two of sleep, he prayed and read the Bible, and asked the Lord why men were so weak and evil.

Gaunt and tired from his life of joy and sorrow, on his fifteenth birthday, following a whispered command, he wandered onto the grounds of the old Presbyterian church where his mother had been buried, a sinner somehow embraced by this profligate church.  And there he stood before her marker in the mist of a late fall afternoon and felt a presence like no other, drawing his eyes upward to the giant stone angel that guarded the souls of those within this ground, and Delbert sunk to his knees, down to the cold and darkening ground.  And there he knelt for all a night in the trance of the angel in which rested his mother’s and his maker’s love, and when he rose the next morning his face was radiant and his chest full and thankful.

Now, worshipers at the Pentecostal church no longer speak of him aloud but wonder in their heart what really became of Delbert Mahew.  Whispers in the valley suggest that he lives only across the mountain with a small blonde wife and two little babies, but others know better.  They say that nothing remains of Delbert after he ran to his grandfather’s knee, ablaze with hope and love, and confessed his sinful thoughts of a new life free of condemnation, and that righteous old man knew the work of Satan’s hand and delivered him up to Belzul.