The children walk single file from the red schoolhouse
in the parking lot to the waiting yellow bus
on Highway 7, one adult always present at
their departure or upon their return
After school, they ride their bikes and skateboards
on the smooth white, circular, cement sidewalk
that rings the commons or climb the jungle gym,
their electronic games abandoned on their front steps.
One hungry boy knocks on a door to ask for a sandwich
The old woman inside asks: “What could you do to earn it?”
He doesn’t know, but says he’ll come back. Minutes later
he returns with a broom to sweep her porch, steps and walk.
These children don’t know why the founders’ homes
were built so close, houses sharing walls
so far out of town where there is so much space
Black Angus grazing in fields across the road
or that their basements were once connected
so no one had to walk outside in the mud
to visit neighbors. They don’t know that some original residents
built their own units, a few with plumbing
that emptied directly into the ground,
or that the community’s water supply
was stored in Unit 13’s basement
and everyone bathed just once a week
but attended church in the community center’s
basement every Wednesday and Sunday.
They don’t know about the community dramas
and touch football games played on the commons
or about the community school, co-op, and garden
gone or overgrown before they were born.
They have seen and hefted the heavy, iron,
Second Battle of Bridgeport, Civil War cannonballs
recovered from some of the common’s oldest tree trunks
but have heard whispers about the arguments that split
their community and church—women in the priesthood,
prophetic succession, building the Center Place temple,
its 300 foot silver spire five miles west, visible from their rooftops.
Most of them only visit the community center,
for an occasional potluck dinner or a free ice cream social
However, the phone tree still works so anyone’s mom or dad,
whose car breaks down, gets a ride within minutes.
and the community center food pantry is stocked
with dried rice and pasta, canned tomatoes and beans,
and board games to help families get through “rainy” days.
Over the years, hundreds have gathered here
to live together—believers, battered women,
single mothers, unemployed dreamers—in these homes
around the centuries’ old oaks that ring the commons.
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.
return