More on: Poetry

Sure, I’d had too much wine and not enough of the Advent hope that candles are lit for; and I’ll confess up front, I was without charity for our guest who, glassed in behind those black, small, rectangular frames, reminded me of those poems that coldly arrange a puzzle of non sequiturs to prove again…

In the middle of the day, I was lost in thought, staring at my newly dead father, or the portion of him the funeral home gave me back in a cheap little plastic urn I’d placed on my study’s mantle. I’d been reading about Bede’s sparrow, which, it turned out, was not Bede’s at all,…

For the word is living and active …………—Hebrews 4:12 Irene, a girl’s name. Irenology. Studies in peace. How does peace circulate? Open in Ezra and paging to Nehemiah, ——–I contemplate exiles rebuilding temple walls. I thought, is this a form of peace studies? Confess our sins. Our inability to perform ——-a divinely ordained task by…

At secret slumber parties, Ruth and Ruby burst out of back rooms transformed. Their own version of ascension: loosed hair fanning pubic bones, shrieking louder than the rest of us. No bonnet, no beckoning church. Strong legs in borrowed Levi’s, our lipsticks strewn through sleeping bags. § From stolen stacks of their brothers’ outdated films…

Three things you can’t control: life, death, and children. Lord knows, you’ve tried. Good God knows, there’s holy risk just beyond the farm lane’s bend. And the paper and the radio shout of doom-oh-doom-oh. Yet you can force certain things to taste as you expected; you can bake brave resolution into rhubarb, its stiff pink…

Once, there was a path from springhouse to kitchen’s side entrance splitting the hill. Once, there was a sudden almost- funeral: daughter gasping in the water trough, pushed in by older brother now turned senator. Farmers once retrieved dippers for clear gulps between harvest and the afternoon milking, the springhouse door fashioned to resist an…

(Twenty-four crusts to be frozen) Rise when sky’s amber. As coffee pot fusses, sift dry ingredients, butter the size of an egg. Measure out the needed doses. Have a passing thought about those years you weren’t allowed in this farmhouse kitchen without permission, how your new mother- in-law clucked each time flour clouded to the…

or something in the sight adjusts itself to midnight…. —Emily Dickinson For a while, I’ve been considering nothing. The nothing my grandmother refused and my grandmother’s grandmother, all of them stretching back through the void with their kinds of certainty bracing the light of the stars. In the Methodist church, my grandmother opened her hymnal,…

The animal in us wants to leap up, leap out maybe, like the dog on its chain trying to bound higher and farther than the chain allows because the two boys in their kiddie pool are bounding, scooping up water in their hands and tossing it and jumping, as the woman beside the house on…

There is No God But God. I think Therefore I am. I am; There is Therefore No God. I think, “But God, But God….” I am, I…think. Is there No God Therefore? Therefore Good for No God Am I. There is, I think, “I.” Think There: For There is But God. I am No God,…