I read my ink-splotched Bible thru and thru
of beat-up Jeremiah and persecuted Paul,
but all it does is remind me of you:
the way you left the farm, your rough hands
writing down Bible history and ancient Greek,
between marrying Mom and joining the CPS
and doing grisly autopsies at Greystone Park,
how did God’s goad ever land you in Honduras?

In the mountains of cathedral corrupt Medellin
you took exacting notes from the linguist Nida,
curling your lips & tongue for each Spanish phoneme
not at all like swallowing your German sauerkraut -
rather, writing a hundred letters to your folks at home,
cramming verbs and verses before gnawing on doubt,
while Ruthie and Mark and Mom were sick as dogs
you walking the city blocks for medicine and milk.

There was the long flight to cooler Tegucigalpa
logistics to hammer out with Krady and Garber,
Trujillo still hidden, simmering with salty agua,
not knowing the noisy DC3 would yo-yo
onto the pasture between the blue Caribbean
and the wild coastal teepee hills of Trujillo,
where white mail boats bobbed with diesel drums
and the fishermen in cayucos netted shrimp.

A gringo exploring the old fort, cannons facing the sea,
Dad walks the town square shimmering in the heat
his plain clothes & Bible melting under tyranny
of the 500 year old shadow of this Catholic church
standing sphinx-like, astride the pueblo plaza
as if Columbus were still landing off the coast
with pirates and empires to be won or lost,
but you plant three churches without pews or walls.

And you heard the local priest fake Mass
whiskey-breathed and pocketing lempiras
picked from offering plates of the poorer class,
how he would not bury the town campesinos - 
no money, no service - their children dying of worms,
and when this priest dropped his clerical clothes,
Trujillo buzzed as he Roxi Hoteled his senorita,
becoming a fugitive by boat by plane to Costa Rica.

You held English services in the elegant home
of old Mr. Griffiths, of Cayos Cuchinos & sailing ships -
an islander at heart, a big man of the foam and sea -
who stood hard outside with the men, not listening
but fighting cancer and hell with there’s always mañana,
until he lay dying day by day with you whispering
into his repentant ear of Jesus, the eternal manna
dying with forgiveness in his smile, sighing.

The church bell tolled, ringing house to house
as you dressed his body for the midnight funeral,
waking Mom quickly to put on her Sunday blouse
to join the cobblestone procession, hymn-singing the bars
of “Some Sweet Day” being “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,”
sailing then from the dark wharf under warm ocean stars
by boat to bury him by morning in Bonacco,
did you hum “O’er Death’s Sea in Yon Blest City?”

I read your daily epistles as if they were written
from the holy pages to the new Corinthians,
when you taught on Sunday afternoons in prison
after morning services in Cristales by the beach,
when a hundred Moreno kids black as coal clamored
for cards, for prizes, for memorizing outloud each
strange corito & verse, after the flannelgraph show
you and Pedro walked sweating, slowly up the hill.

The days were like Jacob digging a rude garden
dripping perspiration from your white-brim helmet
onto the machete slicing grass south of Eden,
cutting bean poles for limas in the rocky soil,
between mail boats, mission reports, hurried essays,
when Mom’s pregnant, her boils grow, you drain them,
and its still 90 degrees when the lights cut off at ten
so you light the kerosene lamp, have to keep typing.

Two bolos reel across moon-lit Trujillo streets
singing drunken songs, barking the dogs, squealing the pigs,
behind white adobe walls and open window screens
Mom wakes to heat rash, mosquito bites and ticks
the bed wet with the all night sweats of torrid tropics,
O thank God the rain comes hammering on the zinc roof
banging out the white noise of marimba rhythms
while Dad, never hearing a sound, sleeps snoring aloof.

In the early 50s long before April when I was born,
before the Griffith’s Julia sank a gold mine of hope
you salvaged the Gospel from those who mourn
the loss of letters, the witness in flesh and bone,
you blessed the Trujillo families who still remember,
as I sit trembling here before your gray tombstone,
I know I’ve seen the face of God in you, my father
a simple shepherd standing over the turquoise sea.

© 2001 Daniel R. Miller