More on: Poetry

So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw [her] working at the wheel.                                       —Jeremiah 18:3 Coming in from the wind, disheveled, we cluster like commas around the woman at the wheel. Her foot…

On the hospital bed, a body: long, straight, and still breathing, though the eyes don’t open and the ears can’t hear. No sound escapes the body’s vocal cords to slip across its lips. Two women on straight-backed chairs watch and wait. The woman who is the mother naturally insists on hoping. Says she sees eyelashes…

Not only were the largest of the church bells cast in pits, there, beneath the thrusting of the tower, at times the earthly founding of a bell came first, when walls rose above the mold, above the flower of bronze they sexed with a clapper, then block-and-tackled from the ground into some hymn or other,…

A child sees inside the stained-glass window the pride of the garden that came before the hand that raised this smoke, this corpse, this rose. His mother signals him to pray with those who come to kneel beneath the candle fire. The child sees inside their stained-glass window the petals of the wound that cannot…

Fiche bliain ag fás, Fiche bliain ag borradh ’sag at, Fiche bliain ag titim, Fiche bliain cuma tú ann nó as. ___________ —Traidisiúnta, Déisibh Mumhan 1. Dead leaves scrape across the paving of the derelict church. A small crowd is gathered with candles. A priest sits by a white-clothed table. How long more can we…

Holy Wednesday Lord, I know that the bitterness is for her own good. Through the numbness that has made her quadriplegic, she has drawn nearer to you, has been purged as with bloodroot of whatever sins still grieved you. Her pneumonia has sent her to hospice. Her descent was rapid. She sleeps her morphine dreams.…

My hair’s pulled back to disguise the grime, though maybe it’s well that I’m unclean, since from dust you came, to dust you will return, the priest recites, smearing my forehead. Once, twice, and I’m marked, a lintel in plague years. I’m invited to kneel and read the fifty-first Psalm, recalling how David watched Bathsheba…

Tenderly as one cradles a bowl of water, he embraced me, and we rose upwards. Black as night, first mother of songs, he opened my mouth and images thronged around me: some pressed themselves like kisses or worn lace against my arms, while others I only glimpsed in wing-beat. Strong as any lover who had…

Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful, for I have taken refuge in you; in the shadow of your wings will I take refuge until this time of trouble has gone by. _______________Psalm 57:1 Sitting in the gazebo at Saint Meinrad Archabbey, ___she hears the sky grumbling as one cloud swells, ______its lining stretched…

If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts. ___________________—Psalm 95 VI At first the thunder and rain defeat but then renew the ground and break it terribly open. Now even the dawn has heavy darkness in it, the sun, in silence seeming to refuse the sky, has heeded what was needed, to stun…