In a treeless park on a hilltop
in an unremarkable Midwestern town
is a well-kept, empty green lawn
that hardly anyone walks across.
Tour buses discharge scores of teenagers
and senior citizens into the summer heat.
They quickly seek air conditioning in one
of three visitors centers surrounding the block.
They aren’t tourists but pilgrims from three divergent churches
who’ve traveled hundreds or thousands of miles
to see the unassuming suburban spot
chosen through revelation by their common founder
for his followers to gather in the last days
to build the temple of the New Jerusalem.
The first church has a nautilus-shaped temple
with a 300 ft. silver spire across the street to the east,
to the south, a 5,000 seat green, domed auditorium,
to the north, a cream limestone church,
and to the west, a small white wooden church
all built by followers of the Prophet’s eldest son.
The second, the largest, has a white columned
visitors center and red brick meetinghouse directly southeast
constructed by the church of the Prophet’s apostles’
who left the US and emigrated West.
And the last, a white church on the lawn’s
northeast corner erected by members
of the smallest group, who returned first
from Illinois and repurchased the center lot.
Unlike Jerusalem, however,
nothing is built atop this sacred place
reminiscent of the empty space
behind the curtain in the Second Temple
that hung before the Holy of Holies,
a tapestry of the heavens embroidered
in blue, purple, crimson and white thread.
Now all three churches wait
to begin building the edifice
that will usher in the last days.
In 2021, Bryan R. Monte placed second in the Hippocrates Open Poetry and Medicine Competition and was a Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Competition finalist. His poetry has appeared recently in ArLiJo.com, Kaleidoscope Magazine and the South Florida Poetry Journal and in the anthologies Voices from the Fierce Intangible World (SoFloPoJo Press, 2019) and the 2021 Hippocrates Prize Anthology (The Hippocrates Press, 2021) and is forthcoming in Without a Doubt: poems illuminating faith (New York Quarterly Books, 2022). His articles have appeared in The International Journal of Mormon Studies and in The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal.
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