We are surrounded by God’s Creation, the ocean we swim in. The Southern Cliff in the Lagoon nebula is five light years tall. Including the Oort cloud, our solar system, is two light years across.
The God I imagined fits within that. God filling the galaxy stretches my imagination. Imagining God filling the known universe is beyond me.
Jeffrey L. Taylor is a retired Software Engineer. Around 1990, poems started holding his sleep hostage. He has been published in The Perch, California Quarterly, Loud Coffee, Texas Poetry Calendar, and Texas Poetry Assignment.
The Woman of Purple [Lydia], a dealer in purple cloth, who worshipped God, and the Lord opened her heart to hear… Acts 16:14
It wasn’t only that the rock snails illuminated the gardens with their slimy trails, nor that they slugged through the night in barely audible streams, it was that they had within them the glory of uncommon color— as if they were reciting verses of praise each evening. Stars guarding heaven come so close, that I can hear their burning sparks and smell the incense of wonder. Those snails! With salt and morning dew, I dip linen and wool, and let the day deepen their countenance— a cloudburst sunset, my heart bruising my skin, tonight I hear the song of snails.
Ellen Jane Powers lives on the North Shore of Boston. Her life and career have taken many twists and turns, but she’s not strayed from pursuing Spirit. She spent 12 years on the editorial review board of a small literary journal from Maine. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals and in two collections of poetry, Celestial Navigation (Cherry Grove) and Toward the Beloved (Finishing Line).
angular flake grasped in sunlight stained windowpane shimmered holy thirteen thousand years connect golden fallen leaves crisp November prayer in glint soil and time weathered rind shared whispers ancient struggle current hope
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flake held above me sunlight pours through thinned stone dirt and rain taken toll on us on weathering amber chalcedony my eyes greet his tease write poetry about history about our weathering our connection between thirteen thousand years and present
I warble disgraced calligraphy my sigh awe in dirt awe in strikes millennia deep debitage love song the screen catches my sunlight marvel
Kim Malinowski is a lover of words. Her collection Home was published by Kelsay Books. Her verse novel Phantom Reflection was published by Silver Bow Press. Buffy’s House of Mirrors was published by Q, an imprint of Querencia Press. Reverberations was published by Kelsay Books. Her chapbook Death: A Love Story was published by Flutter Press. She writes because the alternative is unthinkable.
Beneath towering big leaf maples, huckleberries tempt me with their translucent red. A salmon berry’s bumpy bright orange pricks my fingers. Beside delicate maidenhair fern, I wander the cobbled stream bed lined with dusty sword ferns. Spring proclaimed by snowy trillium.
I walked here fifty years ago holding my mom’s freckled hand, carrying my infant son on my chest. Moved by the hallowed sound of our family’s footsteps, I called this place a cathedral. Now she is gone and his son is cherished. I find myself consecrated anew in this lush dwelling of the holy.
Now retired from teaching as a community college English professor, and having raised three children, Pat McCutcheon and her wife live in the redwoods of far northern California. Her poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Fish Poetry Prize Anthology , Pisgah Review, Ship of Fools, Sinister Wisdom, and other journals and anthologies. In 2015 her chapbook Slipped Past Words, was published as a winner by Finishing Line Press. Her debut collection, Through the Labyrinth, was published in 2023.
Compline is the Church’s night prayer, facing the danger at the edge of darkness, rendering time holy, quieting minds for rest.
Compline starts with stillness. Silence. Candlelight flickering. Shadows dancing on ancient talismans: wait for it—
The breath of air brushing past, the presence, the cloak of darkness spread gently in
the silence. Holding back the night. Voices rise, a chant written in the stars, transcribed centuries ago when the world trembled with fear.
The breath of air the presence You are not alone. Wait for it—
The prayer rises with the incense:
Be our light in the darkness deliver us from all perils and dangers of this night.
Candlelight flickering Holding back the dark:
This is how we live on the threshold of night.
Jeannette de Beauvoir is a poet and novelist who lives and works at Land’s End—Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in the Emerson Review, the Looking Glass Review, Avalon Literary Review, the Blue Collar Review, Sheepshead Review, On Gaia Literary, Merganser Magazine, the Adirondack Review, Perception, and the New England Review, among others; she was featured in WCAI’s Poetry Sunday, and received the Mary Ballard Chapbook Prize and the Outermost Poetry Contest national award. More at jeannettedebeauvoir.com
6.56 am snowdrops push through cloudless dawn breathe in delicate Imbolc air,
heads bowed in prayer.
Half a teaspoon of candlelight
prayers for the king of kings a promise to return.
Welcome patron saint of poets, printers, farmers, nuns, sailors— workers gather in quiet reverence.
The moment weighs on me, half-formed cross in my hands, rushes press between
thumb and forefinger, each fold, each turn, a prayer,
each turn and wrap a word weave a poem, a prayer.
Welcome patron saint of babies, midwives, dairy workers, beer— blessed, in earthly joy, holiness
hands on rushes, fold with care — prayers made visible,
Weave poems, bless connections between
everyday and the divine; this humble ritual binds us all. Welcome St. Brigid, patron saint of poets.
Margaret T Rochford is a poet and playwright originally from Ireland living in London. She regularly performs her poetry at open mike sessions. Her poetry has been published in magazines and on line, she is working on her first pamphlet. Two of her short plays have been performed at the Irish Cultural Centre in London and she is currently working on a play about Irish dancing.
Not up there, out there, somewhere separate from the reality around us.
Nothing foreign like some great power leaning over the universe
tweaking the force of fate, casually dispensing life and death.
Not the Other, a stranger to our nature but something that shares our Being.
I feel that great Familiar, the life force itself that wears us as its flesh,
holds us nearer than breath, as vital as blood and bones.
*from Wordsworth’s 'Lines Written above Tintern Abbey'
Sharon Scholl is a retired college professor (humanities) who convenes a poetry critique group and maintains a website of original music and poetry (www.freeprintmusic.com). She is a church musician still active at 90 as member of a piano duo. Her poetry chapbooks (Seasons, Remains, Timescape) are available from Amazon Books. Individual poems are current in Gyroscope Review and Rockvale Review.
‘Sagrada Corazon de Jesus.’ Anonymous folk art, painted on tin; 5 x 3.5 inches; tinwork frame – Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, NM.
Tin was called “the poor man’s silver.” Extracted from the earth, and labor-intensive. Whose labor though, and what earth? Tinwork goes back to the 16th century in Mexico. It was pounded, rolled, shaped, stamped, and cut with metal shears. Made into masks, mirrors. Also ex-votos, milagros, retablos, and this portable altar. Earthy, earthly bridge between the human and the divine. Personal. Private. Whose home held this object of devotion?
~
The frame is tin, and wondrously ornate. The humble metal from earth, once a flat sheet, is now lushly extravagant with plants, suns, and, abundant with decorative flowerings. I can’t help but think: pagan. How much of this came from the religion before?
~
At the center of a tiny painting, a man with long dark hair and a round face. Rays emanate from his head, above and to each side. He sits above cushiony clouds. His garment is the color of the night sky. Deep celestial blue emblazoned with stars of gold. His eyes were made large and dark, and his gaze meets yours. Whose hands took up the brush, the paints?
~
The man’s cloak is opened. He is naked beneath the garment, and yet he does not look away. His fingers are painted curled around the garment’s edge. This is not an accident. This is a gesture. The man’s hands part the garment and he shows you his heart. How can we nakedly meet another’s gaze? How do we reveal our hearts?
~
This is not the heart shape of the profane commercial world. It’s an anatomical heart, and the heart is bleeding. It’s pierced and wounded. It’s aflame, a heart for humanity I’m sure. But I think also for animals, plants – all of nature’s creaturas. It is a passionate heart, a passionate love. It’s called sacred. How do we find our devotion, reverence, sacrality, and for what.
Sally Miles paints, makes mixed media art and more recently, writes about art, spiritual experience and our relationship with plants. She has recently been published in The Ekphrastic Review.
What shocked me was not the January snow that covered the live oaks, but that day in September that should have been brutal.
Walking by the bayou, you spoke of the leper the Lord made whole: told to show the priests though not to say where he had been.
You also recalled what the thinker said: when the risen Christ told Mary Magdalene not to touch, he was showing how presence and the need to verify it cannot coexist.
Turning back, I noticed the sugar cane was high. The heat had obscured the year’s lateness. I thought of calendars, lost your word.
As big trucks rolled past, you said accounts differ about where she was when he told her this, when he said noli me tangere, and it is very likely she was already clinging.
Chris Monier lives with his family in the Bayou Region of south Louisiana where he teaches French and English at Nicholls State University. He has published poetry, literary criticism, and translations of several French-language writers.
Neither grief nor belief serve me. A tap-dance around doubt, never a curtsey.
To differentiate between prayer and a prayer’s answer provides me a thud…
Heartache in a vacuum throbbing amid both contrition and infinity
of faith—every soul’s footnote for forever. Apparition fraught or ashes wrought,
the imaginable beckons, as a dial on a radio makes it easy to rescue
golden oldies with a twist. Their renewed soundtrack bolsters
a vigorous voice eager to craft questions coiled in my cranium, earning answers
without cliché, not passé— You’re Out of Order / Your Ship has Sailed,
or Your King is Dead…Checkmate! Perpetuity probes my failed certainties.
I listen for further instructions…eyes and ears encouraged by a next step beyond Stalemate.
Sam Barbee‘s most-recent collection is titled Apertures of Voluptuous Force (2022, Redhawk Publishing). Three previous collections include That Rain We Needed (2016, Press 53), a nominee for the Roanoke-Chowan Award as one of North Carolina’s best poetry collections of 2016. Also, Uncommon Book of Prayer (2021, Main Street Rag) which chronicles family travels in England.
His poems appeared recently in Poetry South, Salvation South, Dead Mule School of Literature, and Streetlight Magazine, also upcoming in Cave Wall, among others; plus on-line journals Ekphrastic Review, Verse Virtual, Grand Little Things, and Medusa’s Kitchen; and is a two-time Pushcart nominee.
Amethyst Review 