A Conversation with Li-Young Lee
By Interview Issue 86
Li-Young Lee’s books of poetry include Rose (1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award; The City in Which I Love You (1990), which was a Lamont Poetry Selection; Book of My Nights (2001), which won the William Carlos Williams Award; From Blossoms: Selected Poems (2007), and Behind My Eyes (2008). His other work…
Read MoreForeknowledge
By Poetry Issue 53
I think he planned it, sort of, from the start; whether he knew they’d choose the fruit or not, he scattered hints around the garden, what to do in case they got themselves kicked out. A shirt of fur around the lamb. The stream converting water into syllables. Bamboo pipes. The caps of mushrooms round…
Read MoreLanguage as Sacrament in the New Testament
By Essay Issue 57
A version of this essay was delivered at Boston University on November 1, 2007, at a lecture sponsored by the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts in memory and honor of Amos Niven Wilder. THE LANGUAGE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT has been with me since childhood. The words of Jesus, specifically, are so familiar…
Read MoreThe Napkin
By Poetry Issue 57
—Lord, take the stone of my heart and break it— When it comes to conversation, I like the idea of the wailing wall, scribbling a petition on a scrap of paper and slipping the paper scrap into a crack between sun-blistered stones, knowing our prayers may not be granted, but trusting the silence that answers.…
Read MoreThe Psalm of Your Face
By Poetry Issue 59
Lord, let your face be lined. Lord, let your hair be gray with patience. Holy Father, let your cheeks be silver with long growth as you put up with me and put up with me. Lord, let your face be a blazon of parts in which I can name you sufficient to be seen in…
Read MoreThe Psalm of Then
By Poetry Issue 59
Then, the Lord heard me in the wilderness of my soul. Then, the lost place of me became clear. Then, I recognized distraction for what it is. Then, I was freed from the desert of diversion. Then, I was moved to the green oasis within me. Then, the still voice of the Lord was as…
Read MoreHalf Like Them
By Poetry Issue 68
Over many years, I have dreamed away my color and turned inside out, like the wet machinery of an orange. I’m all yard; the sycamores are my likeness.
Read MoreDisciple’s Song
By Poetry Issue 68
Carpenter means Jesus—his hands to splinters, a bench to sand and rub smooth corners from the tree’s needle skin to build a boat. I want to follow Christ, but where? To a threshold—a place to marry, a pulpit where the preacher sweats, a precipice, the last land seen as others wave, that boat sails out,…
Read MoreWhen the Lord Returns in His Creaturely Perfection
By Poetry Issue 72
He will burrow and gallop, buffalo the prairie again, penguin the unhatched egg, then sleep off centuries of miracles with the three-toed sloth. What a magician, one minute pirouetting among banks of cumulus, the next grazing underground cafés with the star-nosed mole. Out of caves, from under bridges, a million translations of a single verb,…
Read MoreDead and Alive
By Poetry Issue 72
When they heard from his friend, the woman, that he’d escaped the cave, they’d already forgotten how Lazarus once had come out at his command, although they protested, fearing he’d bear some unholy perfume that would make fools of all who saw the miracle. That dead man, sweet as clean laundry, even ate some dinner,…
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