More on: Poetry

Do not make me one of the trees bowing in soft wind, not the heavy branches at sway or the murmuring leaves. But let me be a molecule of water flowing in the veins, the inner blood pressured through the rings. Nothing so grand as ocean waves crumbling on a beach, or the river running…

A silver thread pierces my hand, Gleams in lamplight, my fingers flexing there, The needle plunging into bleeding skin, Making a high-pitched, silver sound Becoming words shining in the flame that they create. Tarnished words converge into beginnings, Flame and words, beginnings In moonlight, fairy rings, clouds across the sky Entering a sentence that began…

Word lived in solitude. Walked the dog before dawn. Coffee on the patio. The air was thin. There were no stars. Silence drifted from the river with the mist. Word wandered through the house, looked out the window. Could the darkness speak, what would it say? What would Word answer? Word took a deep breath,…

The angel has always been a strong metaphor to me, raising questions about life, death, and our timeless vulnerability. —Marcel Marceau   I am a Jew. My father died at Auschwitz. By 1938, the sorrows had begun. My name, Mangel, put me at risk. So I applied Marceau like blanching agent that stung at first,…

Black. Muscle. Stars. Wind. The horse was nearly torn in half. Black. Pulse. Strange. Light. The car’s right side was twisted open. Black. Crust. Oil. Shine. Imagine the night, the boy, the stallion, all of them closing in, loose for the first time in months. The car’s pointed hood, the horse’s neck, a low winter…

The following is part of a book-length collection of poems on the life of Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916), a French Catholic religious and priest who lived among the Tuareg people in the Algerian Sahara and whose writings inspired the founding of the Little Brothers of Jesus.   1897–98: Palestine   Remover of rough stones that rise from her flowerbeds, herbalist who thins…

The morning after the blitzkrieg that toppled the vaults of Saint Michael’s Cathedral and set the rest on fire, a stonemason found among the embers one roof beam laid across another, a kind of crucifix created by the forces of accident and violence and then by grace of eyes that saw in them an order.…

Revelation 2:1–7 1. Here’s where a thing gets turned on its head in the mind of a man self-named a sinner. He deciphers inscriptions on gates to the agora: Son of Caesar. Lord. High Priest. Titles claimed by VIPS of empire: Divinity a thing to be grasped at. Gloated on. Devotion wrought by drawn swords,…

Revelation 3:1–6 Not much is left of this fourth-century stone church barnacled to the broken temple honoring the goddess Artemis. And this early synagogue partly restored. Moonlight dissolves the acropolis. The apostle drifts—a shadow, a ghost—past Roman baths, fragmented capitals of pillars, pagan altars. Past a gymnasium. His sandals tattered, old cloak stained. He is scouting…

The children fish off the dock where the minnow-sized ones hover oblivious to the hook jutting from the badly threaded worm. The water’s clear enough to watch victims gather at the bait. One after the other, hauled in, tallied up, tossed back. When the hook goes deep into the throat, they give the tiny fish…