the second coming

As a girl, I worried

that any minute it could happen.

That’s what all the Baptist songs said:

Morning or noon or night.

Coming again. Coming again.

Sunday after Sunday we sang it.

But what if it happened

while I was at school?

Would I have time to get

from my desk in Miss Leavitt’s class

all the way up to my older brother

on the third floor?

What about our baby brother,

always sleeping?

And our father, so often in the hospital?

How would they know what to do?

I imagined the crowds

ascending to heaven—

I had seen the lovely renditions

of how it will be:

Watery colors of heavenly skies

with golden beams of sunlight

reaching for me.

I had always imagined the beams

a kind of holy escalator—

and escalators scare me.

There would be so many of us—

and I know what a crowd can do:

a six-year-old girl could be swallowed up, like that!

And what good are streets paved in gold

if you don’t have your mother?

Please, God, I used to pray,

don’t let it happen. It’s good here.

The smell of my dad’s worn shirt,

my mother’s voice harmonizing

country songs with him after supper.

We are moving soon to an apple farm

they just bought

and there is an old barn

and a cold brook and a warm pond.

My father says

he’s going to fill that barn with animals.

And my mother says we can swim in the pond

if we don’t mind the muck.

We don’t mind at all.  And God,

I love to swim.

Kate Young Wilder