Waiting for Someone to Come

Suzanne Morris

September 22, 2024

I keep thinking of the

mop of blond hair above

the thin shoulders of the

fourteen-year-old boy 

being arraigned in the

Georgia courtroom

the unruly blond hair

concealing his profile

as he responds politely

to the Judge

making me think of

an angel in a Christmas pageant

you know, the one who

doesn’t fit in with the others

keeping vigil over the

manger scene,

his halo tilting slightly off-center

the tragedy of the boy’s

home life

spilling over to

destroy four innocent lives and

irreparably damage many more

the assault weapon a gift from

the misguided father

trying to create a bond

with his flailing son.

Several days later, I am

reading a magazine story

of the last two Shakers– 

Brother Arnold and Sister June– 

aging peacefully alongside their

outer family, neighbors and friends

at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village

in Maine, while keeping the faith that

Someone is coming; the work

will go on

as Shakers have believed since

their beginning in 1774.

I find myself superimposing

the image of the

boy with the mop of

blond hair

upon the utopian picture

of the Shaker community

as if somehow,

before it was too late,

his pleas for help had

been heard all the way to

Sabbathday Lake

where he arrived,

still innocent,

to enter into this

community of love and grace

to learn to plane wood

and grow a garden,

to hay the field and

tend the sheep;

to share with others

in the joyful harvest

at the bounteous

noonday meal

and so to be taught that

he was part of something

larger than himself, that

his life was precious,

his labors

a vehicle for the divine,

that all along

he had been

someone

the Shakers were

waiting for.

–After Keeping the Faith, by Jordan Kisner

New York Times Magazine, 9/8/2024

Photographs by Lucas Foglia

A native of Houston, Suzanne Morris has made her home in East Texas for nearly two decades.  Her poems have appeared in anthologies as well as online poetry journals, including The Texas Poetry Assignment, The New Verse News, The Pine Cone Review, and Stone Poetry Quarterly.