Sly Boys

The sparsity of congregants reminds me of the absence of jestful boys schooled in the faux arts of throwing hymnbooks across the nave. The smelters ran two shifts, fed us beattitudes of paid mortgages and Sunday roast beef as the school teemed every year with five-year-olds. Sidewalks buckle atop the roots of oak canopies, as the breath of traffic grows sparer; the psalms of our minister grow fainter. In the tart air of early Spring those sly boys would cup a book in a palm and pretend to launch it, to the mortification of their mothers.