As lead writer and a general editor of Saints, Scott Hales has helped make Latter-day Saint history vivid and accessible to a wide audience through his capable storytelling. What fewer people know is that he is also a gifted poet. His forthcoming collection, Sacred Scar, offers personal vignettes and reflections on religious and historical themes, written in a style that is both quirky and inviting. He delights in the strangeness that once made early Mormonism so baffling to outsiders—and that still marks us as a peculiar people.
“Big City Prophet,” inspired by Joseph Smith’s 1832 letter to Emma while visiting New York City on Church business, reveals those gifts in action. Through Joseph’s eyes, the city unfolds as both marvel and menace, a place that draws out awe, judgment, and tenderness in turn. Hales captures that blend of wonder and oddness: Joseph Smith as small-town boy and prophet, seeing the city with the same startled awe that once met a vision of God.
— Merrijane Rice
Big City Prophet
New York City, 1832
The boarders at the Pearl Street House
number maybe one hundred, and talking
with them at table, you’d never know
the cholera had cut its way through the city
some three months back,
and the buildings reach like Babel’s tower
above the trees, but they are great
and wonderful and pleasing to God,
the maker of all things, who even now smiles
on every invention geared to making man
comfortable and wise. Yet, the people,
cast from His own iron mold, wear corruption
on their faces, and not even their silk cravats,
tall hats, and hillocks of curls can mask
their iniquity, their readiness for fire unquenchable,
His inevitable sparks.
Yes, my one true and living friend, this city,
our industrial Nineveh, has its limits, but how
the heart yearns to redeem it with a word,
to cry out, to carry its two hundred thousand souls
beyond the strangle of warehouse dust
and factory smoke. And how you rush
upon my mind like a calming flood, dear one.
If I ever find my way home,
may we seek a brighter world together.