Amish Girls Poem by Lamont Palmer

Where is the religious eye? Morning is dark.
In Pennsylvania, a tear has left
youngish ducts, and blood has replaced it.

A schoolhouse was cold. In the wind comes more cold,
and comes a nightmare, dank at its edges,
dank as grass smothered under storms,

When blood played a part it never played,
painting the floorboards a crimson no one
desired; leaving lesson plans scarred and drenched.

Everything in Lancaster seems born
under goatmilk skies stretched smoothly out
toward clean homes; curios, too simple for wires,

and breathing like rain in the fields of a broad farm.
It is they who see this, who can grasp a purity,
who believe thoughts are durable as hebrew staffs.

They stamp out memories of unknown mortals.
There is the penchant to live in the smoke of death -
yet there are drawn carriages steeped in sound,

carriages and the mind of Emmanuel,
and the toughened hooves teaching the sound;
a brilliance lives in stalwart value.

Standing against the world will not collapse it:
nor girls, treasurers someone wants to keep,
when the world enters on vile days: they exit nobly.

The sun dies - no sense stays the same,
no measure of curls, or ponytails keeps its color.
Stains were firebrick red. Night negates peace.