We, the elect,
will be lifted
into the purity of our politics,
lifted like smoke
into the upside-down
buckets of bells.
We’ll ring against each other
and that
will become
the noise of the nation
hanging over the fields,
the bones
like bits of nerve
glowing in the black
soil of the boundless prairie.
Not the families
whispering on their blankets
beneath the fireworks,
nor the lovers—
who fail to see
the primary purpose
of language. We’ll rise above
the left-behind,
who’ll live their days
inside our words
emanating
from radios, screens—
then somehow
they’ll turn us off
when the dark reaches over
and they lie
mutely in their beds.
We’ll try to lift them
toward our righteousness
but their robes will fasten
to their worldliness,
their children watching
as our god of wrath—
god of history—
comes to sweep them away.
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Wayne Miller is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Post-, which won the UNT Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award for Poetry, and We the Jury, which is forthcoming in 2021. His 2015 co-translation of Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac was shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation. He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and edits Copper Nickel.
“The Rapture: A Sermon” was published in TLR: Uncle