Imagine the shell you findon the beach, a large conch,half-buried, glistening inmorning light, waiting to belifted, rinsed, held cupped to your ear: This is your body,listen and hear; blood flows,pulse ticks, the ocean hums,waves curl, crest, hushed, foamlicks wet sand, thoughts rise, dissolve, wind . . . . Continue Reading »
Perhaps you have heard: First Things has started a poetry prize. Continue Reading »
The seaside rock she sits on shines a blaze of purple shell and matte-glazed films of moss.She perches there, bent knees to chest, to gaze the gray and frosty feathered sea across.There, balanced on the edge of both the sea and sixteen, she can take some stock and . . . . Continue Reading »
My trachea’s a well that draws up pailsOf cloudy rainwater, my bronchiolesRivulets in a fen, my lungs dark balesOf sodden straw. My eyes are bowls Of dirty sleet. My limbs are sedge and mossIn mist meandering like mercury.The fever fills and falls in me. I tossThe blankets off then drag them back . . . . Continue Reading »
Today the weather brings to mindthe nature of the curved line,the many ways we measure time,the drawing of a deep breath,the shape of the sail just beforeanother holy exhale.And there, an aperture begins, the signaturereminder the body is at homeand beginnings and endings are the sameas a nonce . . . . Continue Reading »
At Costa Maya, in the Yucatan,we walked the yellow jetty from the ship,with throngs of other visitors, to seea tacky shoppers’ mecca, with a mall,a plaza, palm trees, piles of souvenirs, sweet alcoholic drinks, and, for the ill,a pharmacy with drugs at cut-rate price.We wandered in the crowd, just . . . . Continue Reading »
What shall I say, Lord, now that the wordskeep stumbling, tumbling like loose marblesacross the table then down onto the floor,bouncing and scattering this way and that? What shall I say as one after oneeach sound, each syllable, each sibilantcalls out before fading away? Two sisterslost now to . . . . Continue Reading »
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.—L. P. Hartley While drums pounded and cymbalsDrove men mad and bronze siege cannonPulverized walls built to last till the dayOf judgment, Fatih Mehmet—Shadow and Spirit of GodAmong men, Monarch of the Terrestrial Orb,Lord . . . . Continue Reading »
Living within a stone’s throw of the nation’s leading collection of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood art housed at the Delaware Art Museum, I was familiar with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s art but not his poetry. I therefore appreciate having been enlightened by Brian Patrick Eha’s “Rossetti the . . . . Continue Reading »
There’s a poem by John Donne that makes a presence of an absence; his absent love becomes as real to the speaker and more fully his than if she were present. This could illustrate what Katherine Rundell wants us to see in the work of John Donne, seventeenth-century metaphysical poet and preacher, . . . . Continue Reading »
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