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"Bricking the Church" Poets in Place

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Bricking the Church
Robert Morgan reads his poem "Bricking the Church," 2014. 

"Bricking the Church," a short video by Robert Morgan
http://southernspaces.org/2014/bricking-church
Published on December 11, 2014

Robert Morgan reads "Bricking the Church" in Zirconia, North Carolina, at Green River Baptist Church. Morgan's poem traces the fraught lineage of the church's architecture, embeddedness, and modernization. This video was produced by Christopher Lirette and Clint Fluker.

"Bricking the Church" is part of the Poets in Place series, a Research Collaboration in the Humanities initiative funded through Emory University's Presidential Woodruff Fund, in collaboration with the Office of the Provost. Series producers are Natasha Trethewey and Allen Tullos. The Poets in Place series is published by the open-access journalSouthern Spaces


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“Bricking the Church”
At the foot of Meetinghouse Hill
where once the white chapel
pointed among junipers and pulled
a wash of gravestones west,
they've buried the wooden snow that
answered sarvis in bloom
and early morning fogs, in brick,
a crust the same dull red
as clay in nearby gullies.
The little churchhouse now looks more
like a post office or school.
It's hard to find
among the brown winter slopes
or plowed fields of spring.
Brick was prestigious back when
they set their minds and savings to it.
They wanted to assert its form
and presence if not in stone
at least in hardened earth, urban weight,
as the white clapboards replaced
unpainted lumber which replaced
the logs of the original
where men brought their guns to preaching
and wolves answered the preacher.
The structure grows successive rings,
and as its doctrine softens
puts on a hard shell
for weathering this world.
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