More on: Essays

I REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I heard—really heard—the refrain “Stand by me,” sung by a member of the choir at Saint Peter’s Baptist Church in the village of Allen in Clarke County, Alabama. The song had no ingrained meaning to me then. I recognized the hymn, but I did not know its power. I was…

THE PROSPECTUS FOR THIS SERIES of essays requests that I write about “some aspect of the way poetry and hymnody feed and nurture each other.” For someone whose mother often recited poetry and sang and played hymns to him, who has read poetry and sung hymns ever since, and has now been creating hymn texts…

IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT. Darkness creeps upon the city as folks rush about to parties and dinners. On one street corner, a group of worshippers gathers around a recently lit fire. Strange words are uttered over a colossal candle that will soon illuminate a pitch-black church. The worshippers shuffle in off the street, professing that Christ…

IN LATE OCTOBER I started painting the trim around the outside of the windows white. I finished the east and south sides of the house and moved my ladder to the west. The red leaves were falling from the sugar maple and the buckeyes from the buckeye tree, and the squirrels were making their strangely…

GROWING UP AS I DID amidst the dazzling lights of New York City, it is strange that even as a small child I was madly in love with the stars. The city’s glare effectively canceled out the night sky, admitting only the rare glimpse of the brightest heavenly orbs. Beyond the moon and Venus, you’d…

What…had been plain, dense cloud cover now took on landscapelike formations, a chasm with long flat stretches, steep walls, and sudden pinnacles, in some places white and substantial like snow, in others gray and hard as rock…. They hung over the town, muted red, dark-pink, surrounded by every conceivable nuance of gray. The setting was…