A Walk to Sope Creek

Sometimes when I've made the mistake of anger, which sometimes
breeds the mistake of cruelty, I walk
down the rocky slope above the ruined mill on Sope Creek
where sweet gum and hickory weave sunlight
into gauzy screens. And sometimes when I've made the mistake
of cruelty, which always breeds grief,
I remember how, years ago, my uncle led me, a boy,
into a thicket of pines and taught me to pray
beside a white stone, the way a man had taught him, a boy,
to pray behind a clapboard church.
Sometimes when I'm as mean as a stone, I weave
between trees above that crumbling mill
and stumble through those threaded screens of light,
the way anger must fall
through many stages of remorse.
Any rock, he allowed, can be an altar.

--David Bottoms