Issue 103

I’m lucky to know a lot of really good, generous people, but they don’t fall into any of those standard narratives of saintly lives. They’re people who just keep on trucking and being good in the face of a lot of injustice and ingratitude.

In my absence, one sprig of English ivy
has crept through a crack
under my window.

All at once the stillness breaks
into a great applause of wings, the mounting up
in doxology, the downsweep then
of many heads in prayer.

Objects, rituals, and sites make the spiritual present, function as witness or proof of the miraculous, and turn individual perceptions into collective convictions.

Nomadic art in Mongolia naturally tends toward the spiritual, toward nature and one’s connection with it. Where some painters might want to incorporate shamanistic elements, these evangelical artists say the country’s Christian roots provide more than enough connection to God.

There will be thousands of warm nights

like this one, millions of the beetles, this whole darkened face
of earth erupting in brief constellations.

Praise the mockingbird,

unashamed that he is alone, praise the beetle,
the hornet, all night’s shy & vicious ornaments . . .

when I was young, his voice a low path through nightmare,
reading so that I wouldn’t dream of dying . . .

I read of a man a thousand miles south who heard a large crowd passing by.
He laid down his shears on his father’s land and joined the northbound caravan.

Sometimes, to comfort myself, I think of myself as a city, not a woman, but a city that can be rebuilt again.