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Category: Poetry

  • The Last Sunset: Poetry

    I didn’t really believe it was my last as I watched a sky so orange as to subdue the harshest skeptic of sundown magic. But I wondered. How many people in mortal peril see such sights as they slip away? Polar explorers perishing under pulsating green northern lights? Mountaineers admiring the blue tint of the… →

  • Who is This ‘We’?: Poetry for the ‘Families Belong Together’ Rally

    I’m not going to make the ‘Families Belong Together’ Rally in Onancock today (Saturday, June 30) from 11-12:30. And when asked for a statement, I couldn’t find the words.  So I contributed this poem to be read.  May we find the ‘we’ that is truly ‘us.’ Who is this ‘we’ into which I am enlisted?… →

  • Why We Don’t Care About ‘The National Water Situation’

    “For all my love of rivers, ‘our nation’s rivers’ have not moved me once.  The rivers that move me are those I’ve fished, canoed, slept beside, lived on, nearly drowned in, dreamed about, sipped tea and wine by, taught my kids to swim in, pulled a thousand fish from, fought and fought to defend.  I’ve… →

  • Everyday Apocalypse: Poetry

    Katherine Sonderegger is right when she says: It is a wonder that Moses is not annihilated—consumed—by the Name uttered to him in the wilderness.  For all the other apocalypses in Holy Scripture can only pale before this Naming, the annihilating Speech of God as Subject.  This is the end, the finality of all creatures, of… →

  • The Writing Life–It Came for Me: Poetry

    On visiting Hunterdale with kin long after Grandma died: It was pathetic to look at– Grandma’s glorious garden overgrown with grass. Her long back yard littered with automotive and boat wrecks. The scuppernong vines half the size they were back when. Still, amidst the mess, I could make out the spot where I first knew… →

  • Sitting Beneath the Michigan Tree: Back at the Festival of Faith & Writing

    Kwame Alexander, Newberry Award-winning author of The Crossover, looked out across the sea of 2,000 introverts and defied every tenet of writerly reserve. “Say ‘yes,’” he said. Say ‘yes’ to the opportunity, the challenge, even to the indignities of selling your work. There is power in your words. Kwame has a bus now with a… →

  • To Grope Tear-blinded in a Desert Place: Poetry for Holy Saturday

    ‘If, as some have done, Ye grope tear-blinded in a desert place And touch but tombs,—look up! those tears will run Soon in long rivers down the lifted face, And leave the vision clear for stars and sun.’ —‘Tears,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning →

  • And yet…: Good Friday poetry

    Yes, there’s a day for suffering, for marking love’s dark mien. Contorted faces bearing the cost of contingency and time. There’s no reason to the grief, there’s no cause for any tear. Even the call to Private Ryan–Earn this!– can’t elevate the squalor of our deaths. We all end in ridiculous deformations of our former… →

  • Tinder Mercies – Poetry

    ‘But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder and the whole world sparks and flames.’ —Annie Dillard, ‘On foot in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley’ ‘I have found the dominant of my range and state— Love, O my God, to call thee Love and Love’ —Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Let Me Be to… →

  • Praying with Fire: A Review of Jamie Quatro’s Fire Sermon

    “Dear God: Can you forgive someone for an act they cannot repent of?” (26)  So goes Maggie’s prayer journal in the aftermath of an affair in Jamie Quatro’s new novel, Fire Sermon.  Maggie has committed to move on.  Has cut off communication with the poet she spent one night with in Chicago.  In one light,… →