Before All Things
By Poetry Issue 73
The day Christ died a record-long freight train barreled through the Rollins Road crossing. For seven minutes tankers and lumber flats vibrated through the spikes in his wrists. A fisherman dropped his pole by the retention pond and headed toward the hill. A girl at a bus stop clutched her side as the embryo implanted…
Read MoreElegy for D.S.
By Poetry Issue 73
Comfort, give comfort to my people, says your God…. —Isaiah 40:1-5 Until the day falls there is nothing I can say, my friend. Until the mountain kneels. He suffered so long in wordless suffering, a pain without wounds. May your brother, who belongs now to remember, be restored to light as wood is by ember.…
Read MoreArs Cantata
By Poetry Issue 76
My better angel, my necessary, my made or my born, my homunculus, dwarf star, burning-ship swimmer, my opal and orb, my one truth abandoning or abandoned, long oxbow and pest, my socket and thread, locus and shift, my betrayed and betraying, my thief at the window, broken my bottle, my child gone hungry, room laced…
Read MoreDarwin and the Problem of Time
By Book Review Issue 85
Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It by Loren Eiseley (Doubleday, 1958) Science and Faith: A New Introduction by John F. Haught (Paulist, 2013) Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love by Elizabeth A. Johnson (Bloomsbury, 2014) Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith by Philip Kitcher (Oxford, 2007) …
Read MoreImmersed in Mystery
By Essay Issue 85
Reading from Two Books: Nature, Scripture, and Evolution In the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians described nature as a book, a coherent work in which we could glimpse the mind of God. Like scripture, the book of nature bore the divine imprint—the Imago Dei—and the two books were seen as complementary. In the centuries…
Read MoreTwo-Book Wisdom
By Essay Issue 85
Reading from Two Books: Nature, Scripture, and Evolution In the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians described nature as a book, a coherent work in which we could glimpse the mind of God. Like scripture, the book of nature bore the divine imprint—the Imago Dei—and the two books were seen as complementary. In the centuries…
Read MoreWhen God Dreamed Eve through Adam
By Poetry Issue 85
When Adam saw her, muscle of a new day, when he squatted to smell the musk between her legs, when he leaned down To grasp the wrist of the most familiar creature he’d encountered yet, to pull himself, the mirror image of himself, to her feet; When he took a few steps back to appraise…
Read MoreIn the Beginning
By Poetry Issue 85
In Anselm Kiefer’s Am Anfang A ladder rises like a DNA helix Out of the seething flux, an ocean Of broken glass, shattered light, The bonds just barely linking there, Chiral, as yet un-living, into proto- Membrane, proto-cell, accreting In the sugary stew of their forming, The nucleotides surging tidal As they begin to spiral…
Read MoreThe Microbiome and the Boson
By Poetry Issue 85
After Psalm 139 If humans are ninety percent bacteria, then “I”—a consortium—pray for help in keeping me all together. My microbiome is such a swarm of bits and pieces that statistical analyses can’t prove I am. Replete with coding errors and mutations, I am fearfully and wonderfully provisional. Mitochondria, packing their own genome, reside in…
Read MoreOrange and Spices
By Poetry Issue 85
When Charles Darwin sat down, finally to write his big book he wondered, not how it would end, but where on the shelf …
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