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Name and Kind

By John F. Deane Poetry

Jesus—Joseph’s son. They would ask— Where is your home place? Your village? Your town-land? At the ends of the earth, the far yonder. And what, they would ask, do you do? Craftsman-laborer, poet-vagabond, carouser in the courts of God. Island. Jesus-of-grace, I, too, am island, from an island off an island, out by the edge…

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Kestrel

By John F. Deane Poetry

Vigilante couchant on a pillow of air at hover in the Hopkins-eye; excess of fire, self-contained, prone to set the heather steppes ablaze: Rufus Raptor, of the falcon family, master of the chimney-stack, mistress of the house-sparrows flustering beneath in the gutter-dust; Prospero of the island, of moorland and coast, upland and down, power-bolt out…

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Your Words

By Fred Marchant Poetry

on reading John F. Deane’s Manhandling the Deity “unholy” in the beginning ________“symphony” at the end their long joining through a gate and garden path through gorse and bog cotton and a world stilled for a second as if it had stopped breathing as if in the space between breaths the brain might float like…

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Music

By John F. Deane Poetry

The Joseph lilies sway, in choir, a silent chorus of white-coifed nuns; you stand, distant from them, child of God, suffering God. On sodden fields a flock of chittering starlings shifts; the eye is never worn with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Leaves of the eucalyptus multiply and your solicitous murmurings sound like…

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Lives of the Minor Prophets

By John F. Deane Poetry

They, too, have stood, smitten and bemused, angered at the violence of kings, caught between a rock and the roiling ocean, between the glimpsed shadow of a retributive deity and the gentle features of he-who-is-to-come; they would fasten down the voice they hear calling to them, though they know there is no voice, only that…

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Yam Kinneret: The Harp Music

By John F. Deane Poetry

It is March; in Ireland daffodils will be suffering the harshest winds; here the coach had turned back from the slopes of the Beatitudes towards Tiberias; to the right the valleys, green and flush, rising to the hills; to the left, the lake, quietened in an evening lull and pleasuring; I settled in my seat,…

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A Conversation with Rowan Williams

By John F. Deane Interview

Rowan Douglas Williams was born in Swansea, south Wales, in 1950, into a Welsh-speaking family, and was educated at Dynevor School in Swansea and Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he studied theology. After two years as a lecturer at the College of the Resurrection, near Leeds, he was ordained deacon in Ely Cathedral before returning to…

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Give Dust a Tongue

By John F. Deane Short Story

MY DEAREST KATIE, Do you remember that evening we flew together from Burlington in Vermont to Saint Paul in Minnesota? Do you remember how the wind came in off Lake Champlain and cut through the streets of Burlington like a sawblade, the snow blistering somewhere out over the lake? We flew just ahead of the…

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Name and Nature

By John F. Deane Poetry

Your name, Jesus, is childhood in the body, at times a single malt upon the tongue, Vivaldi to the ears; your name, Christ, forgiveness to the heart, acceptance to the flesh, a troubled joy across the soul; at ever my very best I will plead to you, closest to me, for kindness. Perhaps the silence…

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