The history of Christian countries is a wonderful wellspring:  It gushes forth inspiration for those who stop and refresh themselves with its cool, sweet waters.

 
Southrons will find such to be the case with the last Greek ruler of Trebizond and his family.  The background of their story begins in this manner:
 

‘It was 15 August 1461. Mehmed the Conqueror, after a brutal siege, occupied the capital of the Great Komnenoi, in Trebizond. The final strong bastion of Orthodoxy and Hellenism in the East ceased to illuminate. The empire was extinguished and our heritage was turned over to others. The Greeks of Pontus lived difficult and critical moments. Many times they felt the breath of death. And yet this death in this bastion of Hellenism, which is called Pontus, saw nothing but upright souls and indomitable resolve.
 

‘David, the Great Komnenos and last emperor, was a hostage in the hands of the Conqueror together with his three children and his nephew and successor Alexios V and displaced in Adrianople. The salvation of Trebizond was certainly impossible.’
 

The Christian Greeks falling to the Muslim Turks is much like the Christian South falling to the pagan Yankees.  More on that in a moment.  Let us continue tellin’ the story of this latter-day King David:

 
‘When David appeared before Mehmed he gave him two choices: to stay alive as long as he renounced his faith or for him and his entire family to be killed. From this terrible proposal David chose the second option, saying boldly to Mehmed: "No torture is going to bring me to the point of renouncing the faith of my fathers." So David went to eternity exchanging his royal crown for the halo of a martyr [this occurred on 1 Nov. 1463—W.G.].’

 
Their deaths have deep significance for Greek freedom and Greek faith:

 
‘Savvas Ioannides in his History and Statistics of Trebizond writes:

 
‘"The Greeks, to their honor, boast of two emperors: one who died bravely fighting for his country, Constantine Paleologos, and one who was martyred for his faith, David the Great Komnenos, the last Emperor of Trebizond.
 

‘So there are two elements to the national existence of all Hellenism, which are faith in the homeland and religion. Divine Providence has contributed to this with Constantine as a leader and hero of Hellenism and David as a leader and hero of Christianity."

 
‘ . . . The scholar Archimandrite Panaretos Topalidis, abbot of the historic Monastery of the Honorable Forerunner Vazelonos, in his erudite work titled Pontus Over the Centuries, comments as follows regarding the martyric end of the Emperor:
 

‘"... and then after some months he was cruelly faced with the dilemma, either to forswear or be slaughtered with his children. He preferred the second and saw the slaughter of his sons and his nephew Alexios, and together with them he was slaughtered on the hill called 'Pegioglou' by the Turks, which according to texts, on the other side of this hill Constantine Paleologos fell in battle and was killed. And so was fulfilled the martyrdom of Hellenism in the person of its two emperors: the one who was killed in battle for the defense of freedom, and the other slaughtered in testimony for the faith."’
 

This is how many Southerners describe their war against the Yankees:  an attempt to protect Dixie’s freedom and the purity of her Christian Faith from the invaders.  But like the Pontian martyrs, the deeds of the Southerners who sacrificed themselves for the well-being of their people have been obscured:

 
‘From these testimonies and opinions, we effortlessly conclude that we stand before a crowned martyr vindicated by God the just Judge, yet unjustly treated by all of Hellenism, since his sacrifice is neither highlighted nor his martyrdom honored. There are many reasons why the martyred King was not properly honored. But now we, the descendants and heirs of the Trebizond Empire, should highlight the common consciousness regarding his martyrdom for Christ, and pay him what he is due as sons of the beloved homeland, and verify the golden-mouthed saying which says: 'Just as the sun will not embarrassingly extinguish, the same goes for the memory of the martyrs."’

 
Thus are the Greeks reviving the memory of the Martyr David and his family.  Moving words, these:

 
‘The ever-memorable former Metropolitan of Leontopolis, Sophronios Efstratiadis, in his scientific work titled The Hagiologion of the Orthodox Church, writes the following regarding our debt to the martyrs who were in obscurity without due honors being attributed to them:

 
‘"Wherefore we have a sacred duty to resurrect the dead of the earth and the living in heaven, and for the Church to ascribe to them her glory - the beauty, the forms and the names of the heroes of the faith - who through their blood and through their life established her foundations and are part of her undefiled crown, diamonds fallen from the precious crown, a sacred treasure of our faith. We have a sacred duty to seek and find the stars hidden by the clouds and place them among the heroes of the faith."’
 

And the closing lines, just as powerful:

 
‘We must honor the day of his martyrdom, proving to all those who delivered to obscurity this person and his martyric end, that the children of those who were uprooted, as the years go by, that not only are they not forgotten, but rather with sacred awe they address their sacred history, they study and learn the lessons, values and power and proceed to sail around the world in the Argo that did not stop her journey. The children of the Pontians do not forget, because they have within them the voices of their fathers, as trumpeted by the ever-memorable Leonidas Iasonides: "May our throats become dry, if we forget you, O Pontian earth."’
 

Southerners have this same duty, to rescue from obscurity the noble deeds of our ancestors who fought a mighty enemy with scant resources but strong faith in God, who sacrificed life and the fair bloom of youth and the quiet repose of their agrarian homes for their Southland, who watered it with rivers of their blood.  This is our duty, the duty of every one of us: to reverence our ancestors with awe and hand down their stories to our children and to our children’s children as sacred history.
 

Perhaps for such an act of filial piety the Lord our God will allow Dixie to make strides towards cultural and spiritual renewal, and to recover the political independence we knew for a few fleeting, difficult years.
 

​Sun setting,
Driving home,
A look to the horizon –
Oak trees, many,
Standing against
The bronze sky
Tinged rose-pink.
Another look;
Beyond the trees looms
An high hill,
Taller than they,
No natural formation.
Rather, a gathering
Of garbage,
Bagloads and truckloads
Delivered daily,
Compressed and buried
Beneath layers of dirt
Until the formation
Rises high
Into the heavens.
Pagan man built
Mysterious monuments
And temples unforgettable.
Christian man raised up
Churches and cathedrals
Filled with divine beauty,
Meeting places
Of Heaven and earth.
And Modern,
Post-Christian Man?
Behold what he has
Bestowed upon the world –
Trash Mountain!

The history of Yankeedom (those States generally north of the Ohio River and beginning with Minnesota heading east, but also including their descendants further west: California, Oregon, Washington, and Utah) began in New England with a group of Englishmen and women who believed that the Church of England was totally corrupt (and that they were not) and that they had to separate themselves from it in order to be saved:

 
‘The first wave of colonists came to Plymouth (which was later absorbed by Massachusetts) in 1620. These settlers were Separatists, but we often call them the “Pilgrims.” English Separatists believed that England’s legally established church was corrupt and irredeemable. They wanted to hold their own private church meetings instead of going to Church of England parishes, but it was not legal in England to start an independent congregation. Facing severe persecution, some English Separatists had already fled to the relatively freer climes of Holland.

 
‘Some of the Separatists in Holland worried about the corrupting effects of Dutch culture too. In 1620, just over a hundred people sailed to Plymouth on board the ship Mayflower. Upon arrival, the men of the colony signed the Mayflower Compact, committing themselves to the creation of a “civil body politic” that was devoted to “the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our king and country.”’

 
As Yankee culture matured and crystallized, there would be other outbursts against peoples they believed to be impure. Dixie was one of those peoples they scorned as such, and it helped precipitate the War and Reconstruction:

 
‘That same year [1860] William H. Herndon [of Illinois, a close friend of Lincoln’s] proclaimed that “Civilization and barbarism are absolute antagonisms. One or the other must perish on this Continent. . . . Let the natural struggle . . . go on. . . . I am thoroughly convinced that two such civilizations as the North and the South can-not co-exist on the same soil. . . . ”

 
‘ . . . scarcely had the war ended when the Nation announced that Northerners must “colonize and Yankeeize the South, . . . in short to turn the slothful, shiftless Southern world upside down”’ (Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South, U of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 1988, pgs. 260, 269)

 
For righteous Yankees, the barbaric Southerners either had to be eradicated or transformed into Northerners.
 

The eugenics movement (genetic purity) in the US was begun under Yankee auspices: Charles Davenport of Harvard was a leader; Indiana passed the first sterilization law; and New York City hosted the Second International Eugenics Congress in 1921.

 
The violent murders committed by LGBT individuals (against Christian students in Tennessee and Minnesota, and against conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah) are the latest instantiation of the Yankee spirit that restlessly seeks to ‘cleanse’ society of those elements it sees as undesirable. Per Dr Clyde Wilson: ‘The violent rhetoric and assassinations being perpetrated today against conservatives are exact copies of the hate and murder committed against Southerners by abolitionists in the 1850s. They are from the same Yankee culture and personalities.’

 
From an historical perspective, it is interesting that this Yankee obsession with purity has antecedents in the schismatic and heretical groups that afflicted the early Church in Africa. Groups like the Novatians and Donatists believed that the Church in this world consisted of perfect saints, and all those who sinned were to be expelled from the congregation. Church Fathers of Africa like St Cyprian of Carthage (+3rd c.) and St Augustine of Hippo (+5th c.) rebuked them for these teachings.
 

‘The presence of those who have sinned does not destroy the sanctity of the Church; the tares do not prevent the wheat from growing. The Novatians taught that the presence of one who had lapsed infects all of society, as it were, and it is then no longer holy. “But with us,” writes St. Cyprian, “according to our faith and the given rule of divine preaching, agrees the principle of truth, that every one is himself held fast in his own sin; nor can one become guilty for another . . .”’ (Saint Hilarion Troitsky, On the Dogma of the Church, Fr. Nathan Williams, translator, Uncut Mountain Press, 2022, p. 470).

 
‘According to Donatist doctrine, there must be no sinners in the Church. . . . The society of the Donatists approved this requirement; among the Donatists there was no one with any kind of vice. When the Donatists separated, this was a separation of the wheat from the tares . . .’ (pgs. 553-4).

 
This is the same self-righteous spirit that was present several centuries later in the separatist Pilgrim/Yankee Errand into the Wilderness. But St Augustine rejects it:
 

‘Augustine takes a completely different view of the earthly state of the Church. For example, . . . he says of the Church that in her there are many sinners . . . . And so it ought to be, because the Lord likened the Church to a net containing different fishes. When the net is brought to shore, then the fish will begin to be sorted: the good fish will be put into vessels, and the bad will be thrown back into the sea. The net is the Church; the present age is the sea; the shore is the end of the age. But while the net remains in the sea, the fish are together, both good and bad’ (p. 554).
 

Contra the Donatists and the Yankees, the separation of the saints and sinners does not happen in this world: It happens at the end of the world, when Christ returns (p. 556).
 

What St Augustine recommends is very similar to what one finds here at the South, where sinners and saints live together. St Hilarion paraphrases his teachings in this regard:
 

‘One ought not to sever fellowship with sinners, but one must naturally withdraw from fellowship in sins. Sinners in the Church can be of no harm. They should only be excluded in extreme cases, but peace should be preserved . . . . If this exclusion would break the peace, it were better to exclude them only from one’s heart’ (p. 555).
 

This spirit of gentleness toward the wayward is evident all throughout Southern culture: in the rascals who themselves make up a portion of our literature, in A. B. Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes or G. W. Harris’s Sut Lovingood tales, and in the great patience of God as he leads the sinners of Flannery O’Connor’s stories to repentance (in Wise Blood for example). This is again consistent with the mercy seen in the African Church: ‘According to Origen, the Church is not a society of saints, but a hospital established by Christ for the human race that lies sick with sin’ (p. 390, bolding in the original text).


 
The underappreciated modern Greek writer Alexandros Papadiamandis expresses this spirit well in his own writings:


 
‘Although the divine aspect of Orthodox worship always precedes its human aspect, this does not devalue its human character. Papadiamandis does not attempt to make the Church’s ceremonies and liturgical services either “mystical” or “respectable.” The priests in his stories do not cultivate the atmosphere and spirit of “angelism,”. . . . While Orthodox worship is directed toward God, the faithful offer the hymns of worship as one body, conscious of their brethren. They live and move with ease and freedom, as though they are in the house of their Father. They do not feel that they need to act in a certain way or that they should display an ethos different than the one they have in their life outside the church.


 
‘The faithful of the Church in Skiathos live in this spirit of freedom and love in Christ. They are not disturbed by Aunt Marios, a troublemaker who makes a fuss if another woman takes her seat in church. They accept both the eccentricity of old Daradimos, who has the bad habit of saying out loud whatever the priest, the reader, and the chanter are about to say, and the annoyance of Captain George Konomos, who casts scornful expressions at Daradimos for doing this. . . .

 
‘Whatever hour the faithful go to the service, they are well received, for all feel that each person is a member of the Body and of their community. They all live the communion offered by the ecclesiastical gathering in a human but substantial manner, not insincerely, as a matter of habit, or pietistically’ [the latter are all typical of Yankee worship—W.G.] (Anestis Keselopoulos, Lessons from a Greek Island, From the “Saint of Greek Letters,” Alexandros Papadiamandis, Herman Middleton, translator and editor, Protecting Veil, 2011, pgs. 133-4).

 
Is this not an excellent encapsulation of Southern community life, with all of its colorful characters jumbled together – a description very much akin to characters in Wendell Berry’s Port William novels or James Kibler’s Clay Bank stories?

 
These experiences of unity in diversity are not possible in Yankeedom, which has always had the tendency to expel those who contrast with the strictly imposed uniformity, lest impurity creep into the community: Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, et al.

 
This gives fresh evidence for the claim that Yankees are really Gnostics. In their mania for purity and uniformity, they reveal their inability to cope with the multiform nature of reality and their desire to collapse all beings into a simple monad, namely the individual self. The talented Southern writer John William Corrington, who like some other recent Southern defenders (Richard Weaver, M. E. Bradford) died tragically young (may the Lord bless them and their work) – Mr. Corrington describes the Gnostic’s desire to strip the world of complexity:


 
‘What is unbearable about the world is not flesh as flesh, or matter as matter. It is the ineradicable duality of existence. It is that there are other things than oneself. The core of gnostic thought in every form is finally almost pathetically, terrifyingly simple. It is the overpowering childish wish that all things should be oneself, that one should be the cosmos and all beyond it. . . . The very act of differentiation and its realization is a cleaving away from the individual consciousness all else to be placed in the dualistic or multifarious perspective of the process of reality. . . . Thus the gnostic, for all his noted horror of dualistic reality, is not in fact so much against flesh or matter as such, but passionately desirous that all polarities should collapse, all dichotomy vanish into one—and that the one should be himself’ (The Southern Philosopher: Collected Essays of John William Corrington, Allen Mendenhall, editor, University of North Georgia UP, Dahlonega, Georgia, 2017, pgs. 171-2).

 
There have been many calls to restore Christianity to public prominence in the States following the murder of Charlie Kirk. Large numbers of people believe that the early Yankee model of a Christian society, the Puritan-Pilgrim model, is a legitimate one to imitate. They are mistaken. That paradigm is a replica of the heresies of years past. It is not incorrect to say that the Yankee spirit, obsessed as it is with purity, with homogeneity and the absence of complexity, which were such integral parts of the early heresies, is at least partly responsible for the death of Mr. Kirk, whose murderer disagreed with him to such an extent that he felt compelled to remove his presence from the cosmos lest it go on tainting it with ‘hate’ (if the reporting on him being Mr. Kirk’s murderer is true; there are reasons to believe it is not).

 
What is needed instead to re-establish healthy communities with a genuine diversity are the older Christian traditions found in Dixie, Africa, and Greece, as explored above.

 
Make no mistake: Sometimes separation is necessary. There came a time when even the Apostles had to shake the dust from off their feet of those places that rejected the Gospel, when the Church councils had to pronounce anathemas against the heretics who would not accept correction and discipline for their false teachings. We have probably reached such a point in the United States, as discussed previously.
 

For a mild, non-censorious Christian community where saints and sinners can peacefully coexist isn’t possible in the Gnostic-Donatist-Yankee kind of world. The latter will always be hunting for and waylaying The Other, unable and unwilling to countenance his existence.
 

We don’t mean those words of the title in an elegiac, metaphorical sense, though there is an element of that in what we will be discussing.  It is in reference rather to a hard, empirical truth, that deaths are rising in farm communities, and specifically a certain kind of death:  from cancer.

 
News stories about exploding cancer rates in agricultural areas are beginning to pile up.  Here is an excerpt from the latest, reporting on Missouri farming counties:
 

‘Nestled in Missouri’s Bootheel is the small town of Kennett, the Dunklin County seat. With just over 10,000 residents, it’s a close-knit community where good-natured teasing is a common show of affection.
 

‘Once a sprawling swampland, it has since been transformed into an expanse of flat, fertile fields where agriculture stands as the backbone of the region’s economy.
 

‘Kennett’s houses don’t get much taller than one story, and as visitors stroll down the main street, they’re welcomed by a mix of restaurants, boutiques and a cozy hair salon.
 

‘These buildings are dwarfed in size by a silent, boarded-up hospital, its vacancy a remembrance of what the community has lost.
 

‘It’s the kind of community where if something tragic happens, everyone finds out.
 

‘Bobbi Bibbs found this out the hard way. She discovered she had cancer in her colon in December 2023, which then metastasized to her liver, making it a stage four diagnosis.
 

‘Bibbs isn’t alone. Dunklin County is among the 10 counties with the highest rates of that type of cancer in the state.’
 

The reason for this is now coming to light, mainly, the heavy use of toxic agricultural chemicals.  The news story continues:
 

‘In Dunklin County, there are hundreds of thousands of acres of crops — and most of that land is blanketed by pesticides.
 

‘Estimates suggest that thousands of kilograms of pesticides are sprayed over Missouri cropland each year. In some places, wastewater sludge containing “forever chemicals” — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — is applied on farmland as fertilizer.
 

‘Multiple scientific studies have explored a connection between pesticide use and cancer, pointing to a silent public health crisis hitting rural communities particularly hard.
 

‘The University of Missouri, in partnership with Investigate Midwest, conducted a county-by-county analysis of cancer rates and pesticide use, using the most recently available data for pesticides that are repeatedly cited in research as likely to be associated with cancer risk.
 

‘The six counties with the highest use of these pesticides per square mile are all located in the Bootheel, including Dunklin. Four of those counties are in the top 15 for overall cancer rates in Missouri. All counties with the highest rates of cancer are rural.’
 

If we cast a wider net and look at all the States, the data appear to confirm that those with the heaviest use of agri-chemical pesticides and herbicides have the highest cancer rates.  Many of them are Southern States.
 

This is an existential threat to the Southern identity.  Agriculture is one of the most defining marks of Dixie’s culture.  Pecans, rice, corn, black-eyed peas, okra, mayhaws, peaches – the list could go on much further.  Without the fruits of the land, the South would be a much different place.  And if our farmers are too sick to bring forth those fruits, then a central part of Southern culture will die with them.
 

This is not all by accident.  The giant agribusiness cartels want centralized control of the food supply; monopolies in their hands secure them the largest possible profits.  Independent farmers, on the other hand, using heirloom seeds, non-toxic pest control, and fertilizer from livestock manure and other natural sources, are their death knell.  The goal of the cartels is to make the farmers dependent on them for all their inputs.  Patented, genetically modified crop seeds were a big step to securing monopoly control of agriculture.  Along with the patented plants came all the chemicals like glyphosate/Roundup that were to be used together with them, which had to be bought from the same cartels.
 

This industrial model of agriculture is largely what is practiced here at the South today, and it is this which has destroyed the traditional family farm, and ruined the health of farming communities and of the wider environment of which they are a part.
 

​But this model is alien to our people.  Dixie’s approach to farming is quite the opposite of it:  It is based on the idea of the independence of the farming family and on increasing the health of people and land and animals.  John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia, wrote some wonderful lines articulating the Southern vision of agriculture in his book Arator (first published in 1814).  Reading only a few passages from his book offers strong inspiration to reject the present model and reacquire the Southern agricultural ethos.  On improving the land, he writes:

​
​The Dixian way of agriculture not only improves man and his environment physically, but it also improves him spiritually:

But again, this is base, black-hearted defiance.  The Lord Jesus was particularly clear on this.  It is not worldly ease and self-indulgence that will undo the curse of the Fall, but self-denial:  ‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.  For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it’ (St Mark’s Gospel 8:34-5).

 
Church history confirms the truth of this.  Those who denied themselves for Christ’s sake regained what the Church Fathers call the ‘aroma of Paradise’ – holy men and women to whose bidding the creation listened, like it once did for Adam before the dreadful Fall: dead plants become alive again and fruitful, the elements obey their directions, and animals become tame and friendly around them.


 
If we follow the wide path of magi-technical industrialism, which includes modern agriculture, with its smooth, greased path of ease and comfort, the door to Paradise will be closed. But if we put forth effort, walking the narrow path, as the Lord commanded, it will be open to us (St Matthew’s Gospel 7:13-14).  The latter is normative here at the South, the ‘hard pastoral’ vision described by Mel Bradford and other Southern Agrarian writers.

 
The narrow path seems to be in the Southern future, one way or the other. If we stay on the easy industrial path, all of our factory farms are going to fail for lack of healthy farmers to operate them, by necessity making us a people of small, independent farming homesteads again.

 
It would be prudent, therefore, for us to begin the transition voluntarily. Chris Smaje, in his book A Small Farm Future, though marred in some places with shibboleths like carbon dioxide causes catastrophic climate change (research actually shows that CO2 concentrations rise in response to rising temperatures, not the other way around) – his book shows that it is possible for a family to live a good life by intensively farming only a few acres of land.
 

Christian, agrarian voices guided Dixie well in the past.  We must heed them once again if there is to be much hope for a pleasant future.
 

The monk-martyr Kosmas of Aitolia (+1779) may appear at first glance to be an unlikely source of inspiration for Dixie, but a closer look reveals him to be a radiant source of hope.
 
He was born in 1714 in a rustic mountain village named Mega Dendron (Great Tree) to good Christian parents.  When he came of age, he left his home in search of deeper knowledge and wisdom.  We still have his own words about his education:

But love for God overflows and becomes also love of neighbor.  This is what happened with St Kosmas; his heart broke for his fellow Greeks, who struggled under the heavy Turkish yoke.

 
Since the fall of Constantinople/New Rome in 1453, the Greeks had been ruled by the Muslim Turks, who did what they could to suffocate the Christian Faith amongst the Greeks and convert them to Islam.  Southerners should understand this tactic very well and sympathize with the Greeks, for the Yankees have done the same to Dixie:  They conquered our people in 1865 and have slowly tried to kill our love for Christ, to eradicate our Christian culture, and to replace them with the idol of Yankee Americanism (thanks to Fr Peter Heers for mentioning this similarity in a talk he gave recently).

​ 
Father Kosmas saw all that was happening to his fellow Greeks, and the Lord called him to act:

The superabundant humility of St Kosmas attracted the Grace of God to him, which endowed his preaching with great power:
​

Thus did a little monk for a backwoods mountain village renew the Christian Faith and traditional Greek culture amongst his fellow Greeks.  In truth it may be said that without his zealous missionary work (four long journeys in all), the Greek War for Independence from the Turks in 1821 would not have happened:
 ​

​For us as Southerners, for whom Greek culture is dear (just look at the older architecture, for starters, and one will see that such is the case), we are able to see how we ought to proceed if we want to escape the Yankee/American prison.  The main emphasis must not be on politics initially but on the souls of our fellow Dixians.  The rebirth of Southern souls in Christian churches must take precedence over any other goals.  Following close behind that will be the teaching of our history and folkways to our families and neighbors.  As all of that progresses, we will need to create networks to encourage and support one another in whatever ways we can, so that Southern renewal can gain strength and not wither away by the divide and conquer tactics of the Regime.  Given enough time and with God’s Grace assisting us, the growth of re-baptized and re-traditioned Dixie would reach critical mass, and independence from Yankeedom would be a fait accompli.

 
But a good leader is invaluable in any situation, especially an undertaking as difficult and perilous as the awakening and liberation of an entire people like the South.  It is imperative, then, that we also beseech the Lord Jesus Christ, Who is ever merciful and loving, to raise up amongst us an exceptional leader like St Kosmas to bring us out of spiritual and physical captivity.
​
 
May we have the help and prayers of St Kosmas himself in our labors, who stands before the Throne of the Holy Trinity in a place of glory and honor.  As proof of his close union with God, and of what a good friend and strong supporter he could be for a Christ-seeking Dixie, we append this account of the attempted desecration of his tomb in Albania by militant atheists in the 20th century:

May God be glorified in the Southland!

Over the coffin of a fallen soldier
Is draped the flag of the United States,
Signifying that death lies within.
How many a Southern church, preparing
For a patriotic holiday
Is smothered in those Yankee banners
From roof to floor, inside the walls and out?
Worse than the churches of Asia Minor,
Sick and diseased, addressed by Saint John
The Revelator in the Holy Scriptures,
Not merely weak are they but truly dead –
Tombs covered in the symbol of the idol
They have blindly worshipped for generations.
Christ calls but to no avail, for souls steeped
In delusion do not recognize the Shepherd’s voice
But hearken only to the devil’s howl.

Trying to make my way in the world –
Dealing with daily cares,
Inundated with news
From faraway lands –
I become scattered, forgetful.
‘Who am I?’ I ask.
And the question repeats itself.
Under the hot summer sun
In Sorghum Corner, I remember.
Beneath the shade trees,
Beside the placid water of the pond,
Eating a plate of slaw and watermelon, I remember.
With cousins big and small,
A baby with pretty pink cheeks,
A bigger one keeping the power grid up, I remember.
In my sweaty t-shirt,
A passing resemblance
Of Pa-Paw’s button-up
As he barbequed the chicken
On the charcoal grill, I remember:
I am part of the Walton clan,
And every part of me,
From the salty tears in my eyes
As I dwell on all these things
To the salt on my back,
Rejoices in that.
And through the mystical love,
In God, that ties us
All together, I take you all
Home with me, in my heart,
A quieting consolation,
Like a mother singing
Softly to her child,
Until I greet you all again.

​Piles of bloody, dying bodies –
Women, men, little babies –
Pierced by bullets,
Ripped apart by exploding bombs.
Such an exquisite sight;
Such delicate beauty.
To touch that warm blood,
To feel it between my fingers,
To taste it on my tongue –
The delight is . . .
Inexpressible:
I am in ecstasy!
Gliding through the astral plane
With the beings of light
That have visited me and taught me
While in my vile, disgusting flesh.
I am special, they tell me,
I am chosen.
I will recreate the world
In my own image,
And none can hinder me.
I am invincible,
Unstoppable,
Indispensable.
My truth is deceit,
My light is darkness,
My love is hatred.
My closest friends
I make my enemies.
I am the only blessing
Upon the face of the earth.


I am an American.

Many times I have longed to cultivate the earth,
To dig the rows and plant the seed, and watch them
Grow and grow. But Christ our God bid me take another task,
To make the furrows in my mind, and place in them
Idea-seeds, fertilizing them with reading and asceticism
Till they beget the fruit of a written work – an essay, story, poem.
And though meagre, like sheaves of wheat grown during drought,
I offer them to those who will accept them, to the Glory of God.

Profusive in its growth, and rambunctious,
Tumbling down in tangles
From the tops of the trees,
Leaves dyed with the deep green of spring –
Deep, like one sees in the sky at night –
Flowers of soft yellow and purest white,
Crowning oak and elm
With cornets of silver and gold
And covering the forest floor with a carpet
For the Lord to walk upon
When He comes in the cool of the evening,
Scenting the breeze with sweet incense,
Nectar like honey for the tongue hiding within,
Adornment of the spring in Dixie,
Generous gift to the Southern folk
From the Hands of the Gardener
Who fashioned the First Paradise of Eden,
And, in these later times,
The lesser garden of the South.