More on: poetry

Do not make me one of the trees bowing in soft wind, not the heavy branches at sway or the murmuring leaves. But let me be a molecule of water flowing in the veins, the inner blood pressured through the rings. Nothing so grand as ocean waves crumbling on a beach, or the river running…

A silver thread pierces my hand, Gleams in lamplight, my fingers flexing there, The needle plunging into bleeding skin, Making a high-pitched, silver sound Becoming words shining in the flame that they create. Tarnished words converge into beginnings, Flame and words, beginnings In moonlight, fairy rings, clouds across the sky Entering a sentence that began…

Word lived in solitude. Walked the dog before dawn. Coffee on the patio. The air was thin. There were no stars. Silence drifted from the river with the mist. Word wandered through the house, looked out the window. Could the darkness speak, what would it say? What would Word answer? Word took a deep breath,…

The following is excerpted from Lauren Winner’s new book, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God, published this spring by HarperOne. Each chapter explores a single biblical image of God through a mix of exegesis, cultural history, and personal essay.   IT WOULD NOT BE a gross exaggeration to say…

The angel has always been a strong metaphor to me, raising questions about life, death, and our timeless vulnerability. —Marcel Marceau   I am a Jew. My father died at Auschwitz. By 1938, the sorrows had begun. My name, Mangel, put me at risk. So I applied Marceau like blanching agent that stung at first,…

Black. Muscle. Stars. Wind. The horse was nearly torn in half. Black. Pulse. Strange. Light. The car’s right side was twisted open. Black. Crust. Oil. Shine. Imagine the night, the boy, the stallion, all of them closing in, loose for the first time in months. The car’s pointed hood, the horse’s neck, a low winter…

Canadian singer/songwriter and human rights activist Bruce Cockburn has released twenty-eight albums over the course of a career that now spans more than four decades. His early music was contemplative, broadly spiritual, and grounded in nature, with a folk sensibility, and though he converted to Christianity in 1974, he never fit the Christian music industry…

The following is part of a book-length collection of poems on the life of Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916), a French Catholic religious and priest who lived among the Tuareg people in the Algerian Sahara and whose writings inspired the founding of the Little Brothers of Jesus.   1897–98: Palestine   Remover of rough stones that rise from her flowerbeds, herbalist who thins…

The morning after the blitzkrieg that toppled the vaults of Saint Michael’s Cathedral and set the rest on fire, a stonemason found among the embers one roof beam laid across another, a kind of crucifix created by the forces of accident and violence and then by grace of eyes that saw in them an order.…

Revelation 2:1–7 1. Here’s where a thing gets turned on its head in the mind of a man self-named a sinner. He deciphers inscriptions on gates to the agora: Son of Caesar. Lord. High Priest. Titles claimed by VIPS of empire: Divinity a thing to be grasped at. Gloated on. Devotion wrought by drawn swords,…