Amethyst Review

Different Kinds of Mysteries


How you touch me
this morning, late April sun
pouring through the blinds
in your room.  You smile
and stroke my hands, 
as I hold yours, making me 
aware of how your touch
is an act of love.  I tell you
about the word toast, how
I was asked to use it in
something I wrote, so it
could be included in a book,
whose theme was grains,
which, as you said, “Just
tickles me,” making you
so very happy, your smile
lingering on your face,
deepening our intimacy
even as aides pass in the hall,
one of my hands resting
on your upper arm, causing
me to feel our oneness,
to see your light beneath
your flesh, that flesh is only
a metaphor, portending
our inner mysteries, which
enables us to live a deeper
existence even though we
may never find answers to
their secrets, their revelations.
A favorite aide arrives.
She and I facilitate getting you
to sit up, then stand.  I lead
you to the bathroom to be
cleaned, to dress.  In lifting
you up, then pivoting your
body to where I can place it
in the wheelchair is both
art and science, always with
your surprise that we have
accomplished it once again.
The morning has taken on
a miracle in the making;
I am asked to help others
and we are then appreciated
more often than usual.
Scottie, from operations,
even mentions how moved
he is by his always seeing us
holding hands.  He says,
“Other people don’t even get
a visitor and you come here
every day to see your wife,”
tears welling up in his eyes.
How you touch me, I think,
driving home, noticing how
when I pass the wetland,
the new grass in the tussocks
is so green and growing up 
so high, it presents a different 
kind of mystery, another
reminder of how you touch me.




Wally Swist’s new books include Aperture (Kelsay Books), poems regarding caregiving his spouse through Alzheimer’s, and If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from Rilke’s Book of Hours (Finishing Line Press). Poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, Healing Muse, Image Journal, Rattle, and Your Impossible Voice. Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) was co-winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition. He was also the winner of the Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Prize in 2018 for A Bird Who Seems to Know Me.

Haiku For A Friend

Dawn’s apricity.
To walk through snow unafraid
And vulnerable.

Leaves long gone.
No color except the January blue
Of an open eye.

Sidewalk cracks harbor
Hope—weeds percolating through
The endless cement.

A laugh. A little
Sun between shadows. A glint
And gleam inside you.

Ava Pardue is a young poet currently studying in Wheaton, IL. Her work has appeared in several mainstream publications, including Christianity Today and the Christian Century. Her lyrics have been sung at Carnegie Hall, and her poetry has been recognized by contests such as the Wells Young Poets Award and the Lowell-Grabill prize. Her work focuses on themes of hope in a world that often calls us to despair.

sunday

i leave the house 
walking 
to feel my
heady, hypnotic
heart – 

river fog
is thick incense
a band across the trees
filled with the sound 
of mourning doves

soul,
holy,
whole 

i recite street names
 – a prayer
pause at each untamed trillium
– a rosary
and hear a house finch singing

each birch i pass
is hymnals 
lined with lichen

this watery street corner chalice,
the baptismal rain on my face,
  clothes soaked
with sky and sweat.  

the bridge altar
the forest cathedral
my reflection in the river
a deity worth worship

sheltering under thuja plicata,
i drink its breath,
   tasting smoky resin.

peace be with you

and also with you

i am home

Zapoura Newton-Calvert is a poet and professor at Portland State University and the founder of Reading Is Resistance, a community organization supporting social justice capacity building in children and their families through shared picture book reading. Her work has appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.

An Unparsed Moment

Chatter in a crowded restaurant, a concert hall or a theater 
before the show starts; hardly a chorus,
a buzz without accents and expressions 
we’d hear up close to each
Their all-sound is not dismissive of these 
it is their one voice heard unparsed
A poem is many voices become one, 
a radical singularity present but rarely noticed
at least at first but it’s where we’re headed
We’re awkward with transitions, 
with staying-while-leaving which a Moment always is
We have experience with doubtful ordering context,
think whatever appears needs us 
to do something with it, make something else of it
Sometimes all it needs is witness
a wordless timeless gathering 
we and it always were 
A strange yet welcoming silence envelops us
We’re surprised clueless   
We are the Moment

Don Brandis is a retired healthcare worker living quietly near Seattle writing poems. He has a degree in philosophy and a long fascination with Zen. Some of his poems have appeared in Gyroscope Review, Feed the Holy, Amethyst Review, Blue Unicorn and elsewhere. His latest book of poems is Paper Birds (Unsolicited Press 2021).

God You’re Hard to Buy For 

God you’re hard to buy for, love,
with your deep pockets; that massive vault 
I’ve never seen the whole of; and the fact
that you’re impossible to surprise.

You have so much already and it’s just 
not right to give you a scrap less
than top-shelf perfection
but anyway, what DO you give someone
who needs nothing? Truly,
I appreciate you, and it’s not like I don’t see 
the occasions coming every year – 
the day we met; the day I realised you had 
adored me for some time; the anniversaries of 
that time you saved my skin, and when it all started,
or just something because you’re on my mind.

And you do enjoy gifts
given in clear-eyed love, but therein lies
the hitch: this wilted, plaquey heart
that ogles, kneads, gnaws and beats
itself in offset rhythm, forgetful of 
your vows. I do remember
times I’ve scraped together some
resentful token, mad at you again because
of my disease and arrhythmia.
You were nice about it; said you saw how it
had cost me, but it wasn’t what you wanted. 
Times I’ve thrown you stone-toothed,
headached ritual for weeks (or years) instead;
but the gift you want is not a me that’s pressed
into a starchy Sunday best, grumbling and stiff 
in the designated spot, but instead 
the me that rests between your shoulders.

Is it better, in those lead-browed times,
to give you a bad gift? To shove someone else’s
words into a sterile envelope? To face up
to having nothing to give? Or to the fact that
my shiniest, weightiest offerings were
bought with your own means in the first place?
My love, how do you stay?

Lee Fraser is from Aotearoa New Zealand and uses poetry for ogling life’s details, emotional archaeology, and comic relief. Her full-time occupations have included field linguist and parent. She has been published in Cordite, Ink Sweat & Tears, Meniscus, Micro Madness, ONE ART, NZ Poetry Society anthologies, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, Thimble and elsewhere. Some of her work is at leefraserpoetry.com

I Live my Life in Widening Circles of Compassion
inspired by Rilke

I live my life in widening circles of compassion
spilling over the world like Kwan Yin’s tears—
dewdrops on the soft petals of heartache
adhering with tender intimacy before falling.
I may not fulfill this destiny,
but that will be my attempt.

I cry with the Earth, and the Four Noble Truths*.
I’ve been praying for millennia—
in temples, mosques, synagogues
open spaces inside the hearts
of the meek and menacing.

And I still don’t know if I am
the stone creating the ripples,
the lake receiving them
or the outer banks embracing
the widening rings with care.

*Four Noble Truths – Foundational principles in Buddhism to understand suffering and freedom from suffering.

Kaveri Patel practices family medicine in northern California. She yearns to mirror wholeness in other beings, no parts left out. She also wishes to see and sense the world with soul. Patel’s literary work has appeared in About Place, Buddhist Poetry Review, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Passing It On, Soul Forte, Touch: The Journal of Healing, Braided Way, The Healing Muse, The Mindfulness Bell, The Mindful Word, Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine, We’Moon, and The Wayfarer. Information about her meditative and literary offerings can be found at www.wisdominwaves.com.

Permission


As you step inside this blessing, 
notice where you are, 
and hear 

the sounds it makes: sizzle of waves’
tumble and summersault.
Notice the smell 

of fish and salt on the wind, the feel 
of wind’s fingers, roughing up
your loose hair.

The grasses on the sand dunes feel 
this blessing and its music: 
they sway 

and rustle like tiny maracas.  

As you step inside this blessing 
step again, again, and run, 
(or try to)

down the dry, squishy sand to the sand
that’s firmer near the sea, 
and step

and step again, lifting your feet up high, 
and—look—go on—go on—
no one’s around—

you can dance now—



"Blessing with Many Rooms" (excerpt) © Jan Richardson from How the Stars Get in Your Bones: A Book of Blessings. Used by permission. janrichardson.com

Johanna Caton, O.S.B, is a Benedictine nun of Minster Abbey, in Kent, England. Her poems have appeared in The Christian Century, St Austin Review, Ekphrastic Review, Amethyst Review, One Art, Today’s American Catholic, Fathom, Fare Forward, Windhover, The Catholic Poetry Room, and other publications. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

Love is Smooth and Waxy
 
Love is smooth and waxy, like the acorn 
I found in a greenway by the Sacramento River.
We’d parked our car to take a break, were slowly
walking, passed teenagers murmuring in the tree shadows. 
Playing hooky? One couple making out. 
They didn’t look in our direction. No one accosted us, 
no one asked how we’ve lasted together for so long…
two older people traveling miles through 
music and silences and losses of tire pressure.
I guess we were invisible to those kids,
as the acorn was, hidden in my fist,
warm, like a candle; 
heavy, like a gold nugget;
long, like the roads we’d driven on
through plains in the middle states; 
and aerodynamic, like machine gun bullets…
not like the acorns where we’d come from.
I wish I’d saved it for my collection of rarities.
Since we left that place,
it’s been on my mind...
a flame from the forest.

Joel Moskowitz, an artist and retired picture framer in Massachusetts, is writing a book of poems about moving into a new house at the edge of a forest. His poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, Ibbetson Street Press, J Journal, Midstream, Naugatuck River Review, The Healing Muse, MuddyRiverPoetryReview.com, BostonPoetryMagazine.com, Amethyst Review, and Soul-Lit.

The poem I wasn’t going to write


In a fit of petulance,
I decided I was never going
to write another poem. 
Tears of self-righteous,
self-denial prickled
behind my eyes
as I made my declaration. 
Nobody likes me,
everybody hates me,
I’m going to eat some worms. 
But, then I noticed
piping plovers sunning themselves
on the beach,
each nestled in a little hollow
in the sand,
some tucked down so deep,
only their heads poked out. 
With a sudden jolt of understanding,
I realized they were sitting
in people’s footprints,
temporary nests
carved by passing heels
and barefoot soles. 
I’m not going to write a poem
about this,
I say,
no one cares
and
no one else gets to know
that piping plovers sit in footprints
in their spare time. 
The poem tickles at me though,
it nudges,
I care,
I want to tell about it,
if only for my future self
to remember the sharp flare
of surprised delight to see
a little white head and shiny black eyes
peeking out of a footprint in the sand. 

Molly Remer, MSW, D.Min, is a priestess, mystic, and poet in central Missouri. Molly is the author of many books, including Walking with Persephone, Whole and Holy, Womanrunes, In the Temple of the Ordinary, and 365 Days of Goddess. She is the creatrix of the devotional experience #30DaysofGoddess and she loves savoring small magic and everyday enchantment.