More on: blood

I wasn’t afraid until / I peeked into the hall, saw a black-clad SWAT team / scooting along the wall, rifles held vertical, a strict formality / that made the whole world seem shabby.

Called crimson, called vermilion—“little worm” in both the Persian and the Latin, red eggs for the carmine dye, the insect’s brood crushed stillborn from her dried body, aswarm in a bath of oak ash lye and alum to form the pigment the Germans called Saint John’s blood— the saint who picked brittle locusts for food,…

Numb-nerved roots plumb frigid ground. Death, not prayer, rules the apple grove. Love, not death, moves Jesus in his alcove. Soundlessly apples fall earthbound. Tapped sap opens the maple’s wound. The moon pulls earthly seas in gravity’s groove. The wall of roses spent, thorns lasso the loose trellis. Time owns the shroud and the crown…

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…