More on: Poetry

One morning after the crucifixion, a Sudanese boy came to see his mother and father. He found his hut burnt to the ground. Two figures dressed in white asked him, “Boy why are you weeping?” “Because,” he replied, “they have taken away my family, and I do not know where they have laid them.” The…

after Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise The experts are saving the prophets and their wall, ___the prophets and the law, and the door ______to paradise. What does it profit ________a man to gain the whole, the world Yet to lose, or to loose his head from the Renaissance ___and its gilt-stripped doors of bronze? ______The fire-gilded…

Take, for example, This sunflower stuck in a vase. Its huge dark center daily sheds a load of pollen Onto the fake wood veneer of my desk, as if my desk Were dirt; this room, a field; the window, a planet’s Rectangular sky. The myth of ongoingness. We must assent, we do, The clouds rumbling…

The sound of water over rocks is grace descending The sound of animals in the distance is the future coming toward us The sound of light sliding over light is God’s name being whispered to us The sound of a door swinging open on its hinges is our entrance into his garden There all sounds…

1 The cloak of the saint was filled with roses The cloak of the saint rose above the city The cloak of the saint was thrown over the back of a chair it slowly filled with a human form it was filled with the sound of wind It floated down the mountainside sheep it passed…

pace Thomas Merton When you pray, let your tongue taste the words it forms, and let your mind watch the meanings forming. This will paralyze your prayers, but it will stop your meaningless recitations. Next, as you pray to God, think about his omniscience, his power, his goodness and the problem of theodicy. This too…

I look out from a convenience-store doorway, just off a mid-summer Indiana exit, to where he stretches halfway under our truck— body flush against the days of oil and dust washed and unwashed away. He scans the underside to find a leak that trickles from beneath the axle and metal sheltering our children who stir…

I couldn’t wrap my mouth around the vowel of your name. Your name, a cave of blue wind that burrows and delves endlessly, that rings off the walls of my drumming, lilting heart, through the tiny pulsations of my wrists, the blood in my neck. I couldn’t hold the energy of your name in my…

Bernheim Forest Today’s forest floor, a terrazzo of copper leaf. The remaining scrub also copper: copper breath, penny breath, too faint to call it rustling. The mother trees of summer— those iron lungs—streamed oxygen from paps that swayed sweet rock-a-byes in green blouses. But now all is brittle air. Underfoot snap and crack. And all…

I will my soul to waken, and my soul does not wake. My mind busies itself, remembering forgotten songs from my adolescence. My mind recalls anything, so as not to listen. I will my hands to be calm, Lord, and they fly to my teeth to crease my nails. Lord, I will myself to be…