More on: poetry

“Courage, I think, inheres in the ability to realize that there is nothing singular in your own sufferings, that if they have value it is in the bedrock truth they enable you to fitfully glimpse and hopefully convey. This is as true for the truck driver or lawyer as it is for the poet.”

after a photograph by Gordon Parks Of all his portraits of elderlies waiting on the mercy of their Master, this is most bitter by far once our mind pans away from some few pleasant, long ago moments we fancy the wallpaper’s many morning glories having seen, and down to our penultimate mystery captured by values…

Valle de Viñales, Cuba, 2002 In this valley where limestone hills jut out like hairy moles over furrows of tobacco, a rock-face Christ sprawls on a skew cross, as if a child had taken loose chert to etch his fanged mouth, stick legs, twigged fingers. I touch gouged eyes that weep candle wax, caress his…

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. I think of that line again as blossoms blow with rain. Beyond the orchard someone sings. Birds cant their heads to ask if this is the tree they remember, if the refugee finds refuge, truly. Steam rises off the pond; or is it a cordite fog,…

The Psalmist said, “Lord, how shall I not call thy name?” The hills were green with his wonder and the birds flew filled with singing, so he sang, “Lord, how shall I not know thee upon the mountain when thy sheep are the great stars of heaven, thy horn the sun and moon, and all…

Sure, I’d had too much wine and not enough of the Advent hope that candles are lit for; and I’ll confess up front, I was without charity for our guest who, glassed in behind those black, small, rectangular frames, reminded me of those poems that coldly arrange a puzzle of non sequiturs to prove again…

In the middle of the day, I was lost in thought, staring at my newly dead father, or the portion of him the funeral home gave me back in a cheap little plastic urn I’d placed on my study’s mantle. I’d been reading about Bede’s sparrow, which, it turned out, was not Bede’s at all,…

For the word is living and active …………—Hebrews 4:12 Irene, a girl’s name. Irenology. Studies in peace. How does peace circulate? Open in Ezra and paging to Nehemiah, ——–I contemplate exiles rebuilding temple walls. I thought, is this a form of peace studies? Confess our sins. Our inability to perform ——-a divinely ordained task by…

At secret slumber parties, Ruth and Ruby burst out of back rooms transformed. Their own version of ascension: loosed hair fanning pubic bones, shrieking louder than the rest of us. No bonnet, no beckoning church. Strong legs in borrowed Levi’s, our lipsticks strewn through sleeping bags. § From stolen stacks of their brothers’ outdated films…

Three things you can’t control: life, death, and children. Lord knows, you’ve tried. Good God knows, there’s holy risk just beyond the farm lane’s bend. And the paper and the radio shout of doom-oh-doom-oh. Yet you can force certain things to taste as you expected; you can bake brave resolution into rhubarb, its stiff pink…