The Children’s Undercroft

Lyrics

In rooms beneath the church we stood up singing We marched behind our little cross in time to the yellow keys Of someone's castoff spinet, wishing we were upstairs under the big cross The light was ordinary as it fell in through plain windows near the ceiling We kept thinking of the adults and their windows Angels and doves in blood-red clouds We matched and waited to march up to the real kingdom If there are many mansions, there arе many rooms surely The ones I'm thinking of now arе a brown cluster of alcoves Named for whatever child saint Crowned and smiling under its cracked bell jar each contained We were assigned to alcoves by grades After the hymns and marching, we would gather around our saints in folding chairs and learn to be just like them To merit, like them, an eternity of crowned, famous smiling It was a lesson that would not end, even when we had folded up our chairs And stacked them in the last ritual of our small Sunday Perfection, fame, and an ecstatic death seemed all of a piece Anything less, anything as stained and usual as our own lives Was an impoverishment we could not imagine and had to live with anyway It would drag through unremarkable events toward nothing happy For us, as we stood waiting among the crooked stones of the churchyard to be taken home Eternity would either come soon or in time only to be more of the same anxious, unecstatic marching Every Sunday the spinet would sound more cast off Our easy hymns would become dull or silly over-rehearsed, we would at last enter the real kingdom unmoved And not sing