Grandfather’s bred brother
Was a black leather Bible:
Each day to heaven
Was begun and ended
Between onion skin leaves.

He boldly led
A life of Sundays
Of rollicking sermons
And week-long revivals loud
With trombones and banjos:
A leaping preacher
Was his carnival:
A joker who knocked them down,
One to a ball.

(Never a night
Fewer than a hundred
Rolled down the aisles
To the altar.)

But now let the congregation
Remove its hats.
The steadfast preacher has preached his last.
Hum the chorus once more while we wait;
Won’t anyone else come here and kneel?

The stone in the ground
Is no tribute to the man.
He was one to shout glory
To the rafters and railings
Each day the door was open.
Never was he so still as the granite
At his head saying:
      Rest in Peace
Forever.

New York, 1962

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Here’s the poem as I first found in his files, date unknown. I subsequently found the electronic version posted above in a file called poems.odt.