Grace
By Poetry Issue 114
Unmerited Favor
By Poetry Issue 114
You flinched a moment ago when you thought
you heard unseasonable thunder.
Like a judgment.
The Eighth Sacrament
By Poetry Issue 105
Now you are a monotonousness of grace-
light under my steps, the unseen seen.
Silence Is Sufficient Grace
By Poetry Issue 102
Today I am going to try not knowing, learn little and get nothing out of it.
Read MoreFat Tuesday
By Poetry Issue 92
Out of exceeding gloom and out of God, I break a prayer from a growl and sing a hymn more ordinary than tap water. I pray that I might be more than my skin, this dance of atoms, this ritual of ash, this tribe of twilight and rattled angels, this pattern of epiphanies rejected. I…
Read MoreTexas Blues
By Poetry Issue 91
Someone pulls a burning splinter from the devil’s thigh ————————————————& holds it up to the sun— August in Texas. And slides it down the frets to get the dying cicadas going, half wheeze & half-halted gospel hum, if it’s Blind Willie a hundred years ago, Blind Pilgrim born a stone’s throw from here, if it’s…
Read MoreFollies Worldly and Divine
By Essay Issue 44
IN THE summer of 1509, as he lay sick in bed, Desiderius Erasmus decided to pass the time by producing a literary gift for his friend and fellow Christian humanist, Thomas More. Within a week, he completed the Encomium Moriae, which can be read as either the “praise of More” or the “praise of folly”…
Read MoreGhazal: Woman at the Well
By Poetry Issue 53
In this late season, who is the woman at the well drawing water, reflecting on the woman at the well? Millennial fissures in the well-rim, weed-choked cracks where brackish water rises for the woman at the well. At the bottom of the well shaft, the sky’s reflective eye opens, closes on the shadow of the…
Read MoreGravity and Grace
By Poetry Issue 53
Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it… ————————————-—Simone Weil Simone Weil, it’s hard to concentrate on you with those three boys on the next bench blowing up balloons and letting them go, all squirt and grunt, fizzling into— the void, I think you’d say. And…
Read MoreThe Last Book on the Shelf
By Essay Issue 55
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…
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