We stand together at sunrise, Brother Martin,
me and your monument. It reaches out,
a granite giant screaming your name
across an empty valley. When you died,
sixteen teams of wagons, well filled,
climbed this hill to bury your bones.
Clarkston was no city on the plain, but the folks here
did their duty, kissing your boot-leather face goodbye
with burning coals on their lips and your witness
like evening frogsong in their ears.
You said you saw an angel in the woods,
and they believed you. Other times, your words
ran fast, like rivers after rain, toppling mountains,
spilling over valleys, flooding fields.
Like every Adam’s son, you were imperfect.
Jesus called you wicked, and we let you bear
that cross even now, here on this Golgotha,
this crumbling stage with concrete steps
and aluminum seats. This is your life, brother.
How long has it been?
When Oliver Cowdery stepped across the veil,
he waited decades beside a wagon-rutted road.
Then Emma came, Charon-like, to pick him up
in a sturdy carriage. At first, they traveled in silence,
neither one eager to reach deep into the hornet’s nest
of the past. But Emma, her hands loose on the reins,
soon spoke of the house in Harmony, where she
and Joseph and Oliver sat together each evening
by the blackened hearth, their faces dancing red
with firelight and shadow, as she led them in song.
So they traveled, those two, side by side
with memory, until they came to the Missouri River,
its eastern bank a snarl of stones and roots.
“You know, we did all right,” Emma told Oliver.
“When you cross the river, you’ll see.”
And there she left him, waist-deep
in the water, ready to swim.
Brother Martin, wicked man, who came for you?
Or are you still waiting at the roadside?
Your body rests today beyond the glow
of traffic lights, and, if I’m being honest,
this town seems too small for you.
But how great it must be to be remembered.
We all want to see an angel, to witness to the world.
You did both. If you’re still waiting, wait for me.
Scott Hales is a writer living in Eagle Mountain, Utah. He is the author of The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl and Hemingway in Paradise and Other Mormon Poems. His writing has appeared in Irreantum, BYU Studies, and a few other places.
