More on: poetry

And the heart of man is a green leaf: God twists its stem and it withers. ______________________________—Nikos Kazantzakis At first the hunger in his belly did not burn, nor did it lie at the bottom with the heaviness of stone. It was like iron hammered flat, like the dull edge of a knife pushed against…

Remember a time before the big, important occasions that made it into the book, before the winemaking and the raising from the dead. Remember you were a girl, and a boy brought you flowers. The moon moved and another boy brought you flowers. It looked like that was the way it was going to be…

If the painting-within-the-painting, hanging on the wall behind the standing woman— with its sinners wailing at Christ’s feet on Judgment Day— if that might be one way of looking at it, then the woman herself, who half obscures the painting, is another. All we know of her is what we see: how—weightless, effortless as flame—she…

A shape less recognizable each week, A purpose more obscure. ________—Philip Larkin, “Church Going” In spite of fundamentalists, it keeps on being true, what Larkin said. I’m walking through with my Jewish daughter and her three boys, the stone and glass saying not a word to make any of us believe, but I’m seeing the…

_____The row of goyim, that’s us, family of half the family, those who don’t talk of Israel at dinner, here because of fate, because of the strangeness of our children, because of this grandchild in his tallis, his kippot, words we read the leaflet to know. We watch the Torah lifted from its rainbow tomb,…

From The Parables of Mary Magdalene It is like a child asleep outside in her basket, shaded from late afternoon sun, veiled against evening flies, under her parents’ loving watch. Night is coming down, silently, like a worm on its strand of silk. The wind picks up. Let me feed her before we go inside,…

From The Parables of Mary Magdalene It is like a single cherry tree, surrounded with fences and growing in an orchard of cherry trees. The fruit of the one tree is no redder or less red than the other trees’ fruit. Where its bark has cracked, sap oozes out, forming amber beads that harden in…

His paraclete was a piebald donkey bequeathed him by a kindly parish priest whose sins he supped away one Whitsunday some months in advance of your man’s demise. “Never a shortage of asses, Argyle. God knows we’ve all got one of them at least.” Which seemed the case on closer scrutiny. Argyle named the wee…

The Moveen lads were opening a grave in Moyarta, for Porrig O’Loinsigh, got dead in his cow cabin in between two Friesians, their udders bursting, his face gone blue. “As good a way to go as any, faith,” said Canon McMahon the parish priest. “Sure, wasn’t our savior born in such a place?” Unmoved by…

How many minutes does it take a gut-shot buck to helter-skelter through scree and lose the hunter? How many days for turkey vultures to convert death into gliding? How many years till some schlub hiker like me stumbles upon the remains? There it lay— a tableau in bleached bone, flight and collapse converted into sleep.…