Amethyst Review

Shalom Shabbat

Whenever I was Martha, anxious about
many things, my spirits fell 
and puddled like the rain.  But since

I recognized—my Mary side—the one
necessity, I find rain
restful, in its easygoing persistence. 


Housework we will always have with us,
but rain tapping the windows
makes an unassertive friend, till my eyes

drowse over, and I nod off smiling.  He,
the sister’s caller, did not expect
to be entertained, to be made much of,

but simply to sit
encircled, and talk of times yet to come,
to bless and be blessed.

Outside, rain is content
with its work, giving grass its birthright.
A sunny day will be its Sabbath.

Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where he has judged high-school Poetry Out Loud competitions. His work appears in Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall (Encircle Publications), and Covid Spring, Vol. 2 (Hobblebush Books). His own poetry books, Wooden Nutmegs and Magnificat, are available from Encircle Publications.

In oaks, in orbits


The Kami have returned to my meditation—
I see them beneath the cell phone tower
that rises above the Rachel Carson Trail.

They collect turkey feathers caught
in the barbed wire guarding
abandoned rail lines.

Deer cross above pipelines
that move dark blood
under deep red trillium.

The creek beds remember
steel and trout—
chestnut ghosts and coal seams.

The Araboshi also watch
from the valleys—neither spirit
or machine: something

with both faces.  
My favorite forest
has a website and satellite cam.

I think of where 
wildness still lives—
in oaks, in orbits

beneath my sternum.

Janette Schafer is a poet, photographer, playwright, and realtor living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Chatham University. She is the author of three collections of poetry and the chief editor of two poetry anthologies. Her writing and photographs have appeared in numerous journals, newspapers, and websites, including Vox Populi, The Missouri Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Eunoia Review. She is a winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Pittsburgh Original Short Play Series, and the Pittsburgh Fringe Festival.

Great Trees

You come to a house not completely yours
since rain staked a claim on the room with buckled windows;
the phrase work to be done comes easily now
as aches and pains to the man who's stopped counting years.

This is how it will be when your paths cross:
great trees casting shadows on his mind,
for you, the walls of a classroom when the world massed
clean and lovely outside, crying to be found.

And it dawns on you a little more clearly each time
that life is a promise wearing an inside-out coat,
that flight has been an escape to, not from,
and you end up glad in your way to be back where you started.

Ted Mc Carthy is a poet, translator and playwright living in Clones, Ireland. His work has appeared in magazines in Ireland, the UK, Germany, the USA, Canada and Australia. He has had two collections published, November Wedding, and Beverly Downs. A number of his podcasts were produced as part of the National Decade of Centenaries commemorations.

His work can be found on http://www.tedmccarthyspoetry.weebly.com

Found Art

A woman extends her arm
to better see the contents
of her hand: long-stalked
dog fennel, calico aster.

She adds wing stem,
bluestem, wool grass;
sticks them in a lidless
screw-neck jar she 

finds slightly buried.
She sees design
in these woods—
a medicine-bottle

of rainwater elixir,
a pewter button 
near twigs and straws 
of a beaver’s dam.

She gently plies apart 
the growth that binds 
glass and metal,
pockets the finds.

She knows the goods
come with stories
but it’s the foliage 
stems she studies—

their browns variegated 
as wood rot,
grays: soft and furred
rodent bellies.

She’s drawn to the winter 
flora that thrives 
in form, in absence
of color, despite fine

names, tatted flowers,
their spillage of fronds
lighter than dust motes
in filtered light.

Jane Simpson was named Georgia Author of the Year for her chapbook, On the Porch, Under the Eave (FutureCycle Press 2017). Her full-length book, Blessings of the Beasts, (FutureCycle Press 2018) chronicles the eight years she worked for President Jimmy Carter, including four years on the White House staff. Her third book, Psalm Sonnets (FutureCycle Press 2021), is a collection of loosely-formed sonnets and are sacred and secular thoughts prompted by the Psalms. She lives in Atlanta and Ellijay, Georgia.

What is this turning
 
What is this     turning 		
toward us     in the warm 
wavering air 

that shimmers the field
then flickers     fades

A sort of stir     unwinged          
that shifts to stillness     
over the jewelweed     

Is this the spiraling spirit 	
A stirring that reveals 
and soon recedes  
   
that sometimes sails
above the breeze-brushed 
grass     sometimes becomes

an entity of quiet     a hush 
that stirs us     whids across  
			
the willowherb     light  
hieroglyphs     outside 
the cocoon of language  

Katrinka Moore is the author of five poetry books, most recently Diminuendo (Pelekinesis, 2022). Her poems and artwork appear in Terrain.org, Otoliths, Utriculi, Cold Mountain Review, Wild Roof Journal, Woven Tale, and SWWIM, among other journals. She lives in the northern Catskills in New York state and is a longtime Tai Chi practitioner.

A Deeper Egypt

Some deeper Egypt lingers yet in me,
Some soft internal slavery whose chains
Are taut yet barely chafe, are velvety,
In fact, and cause my soul such subtle pains
I barely reckon my captivity.

It’s not so much a matter that my soul
Yearns for its former gods or to supplant
The One Who Is. The truth, though, on the whole,
Is that when I was solely supplicant
I still felt somehow I was in control.

But He Who strongly saves is strongly willed,
And I’m unused to love without constraint.
I sense the fear in covenants fulfilled
And wonder by the lintel’s bloody paint
If there might still be pyramids to build…

Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review, Amethyst Review, America Magazine, Pensive Journal, Forma Journal, and The Society of Classical Poets. He is a certified catechist with the Archdiocese of New York, a Benedictine oblate of St. Mary’s Abbey in Morristown, NJ, and editor of The Catholic Poetry Room.

When Waters Part

Drizzle-wet pavement glistened from headlights. On a quick trip to the vet’s for prescription dog food, I took a short drive south from Iowa City to Hills on 218, a highway with two lanes heading in each direction. It was early February, above freezing with hazy dusk settling on dormant fields that reside on either side of the road.  

Long and steely, a big rig suddenly slipped from behind and passed to my left, then pulled in front, heavy wheels pressing on the smooth black surface.  It signaled to turn right. I wondered why, because no exit was near. Then with a jerk the cab pulled to the shoulder.

But the trailer didn’t follow. It had jack-knifed instead and remained in my right-hand lane. As I approached it, now stationary and blocking my passage, the left silver back corner grew taller, and the trucking firm’s black phone number became more clear. 

Slowing down from seventy, I began to pull my red Impala to the left, but another bulky eighteen-wheeler barreled into the spot where I needed to be. 

It had been a routine day: fifty-six pages read in Crazy Brave and 354 words laced together into the beginning of an essay for my MFA program; bills paid, dog walked, ingredients for chili placed into the Crockpot.

The vet’s office would soon close.  My left windshield wiper, due for replacement, left a swath of water droplets mixed with gray road sludge smeared across my window.  I was tired, in my typical late afternoon slump.

Yet, as if steering a large ruddy swan, parting water as it moved forward, I must have sailed through the thin space between the two hulking trucks on the line meant to separate lanes.  Then I continued to the next exit and made two turns before parking at the vet’s.

Years before when my young son Steve fell under a bus as we began to board it in Switzerland, I kept pushing the button to keep the side door at the back open and the bus from driving over him.  We were heading to the pediatrician’s for his third-year check-up.  Racing to stay on schedule, bus drivers there were known to drive off without checking to see that all passengers were safely aboard.                                                                                                                      

Before reaching down for Steve with a baby strapped to my chest in a light blue carrier, as he lay on the road next to a large black tire, I desperately wanted to call to the driver to wait.  But French words wouldn’t come to my longing mouth quickly enough.  No passengers were there to see my plight.

I sat on the curb and with a prayer and speed I grabbed his arms and pulled him to the sidewalk without the baby falling out of the Snugli.  Adrenalin raced throughout my body then.  Once inside and seated, my arms and hands quivered when I clung to Steve. As the bus pulled away on wheels like millstones, I fully realized that he had come close to being run over.

No fight, no flight. No adrenalin seemed to flow when I nearly struck the semi and was almost hit by another.

Perhaps nearly forty years of driving trained me to handle the dilemma without panic. Quick decisions. Fancy maneuvers. Everyday scenes: a child runs into the street; a skateboarder sails off a sidewalk into an intersection; another car abruptly moves into one’s lane. 

Maybe I was so tired that I reacted with little conscious thought.  It had been a stressful season of responding to one emergency after another, averaging one intense challenge per week.

I drove on normally afterwards, and my hand did not shake as I wrote the check for my  dog’s formula of Hills Science Diet.   

It was on the way home that I realized that I’d almost been in a serious wreck.  Later I imagined how it could have happened.  A newspaper account might have read;

An Impala hit the corner of a stationary semi trailer backed into the right southbound lane of Route 218 north of Hills.  Another eighteen wheeler hit the car on the left side.  The driver was killed instantly.

And car parts flew like startled red metallic birds across the highway and bordering fields.

Near misses.  Unsettling events demand our attention.  Do they usher us towards pausing and reflecting on our beliefs and what our lives hold and are meant to be?  Is that their design?

When I was thirteen I asked my dad if he believed in God. He responded, “As I lay on the sand on Normandy Beach [during World War II] first the guy on my right was shot and killed.  Then the guy on my left.  I survived. How could I not believe in God?”

Through the essay “The Riddle of the Ordinary” by Cynthia Ozick, she discusses how we are affected by the reliable, everyday occurrences and objects that she refers to as the Ordinary.

She writes

The Ordinary, simply by being so ordinary, tends to make us ignorant or  neglectful; when something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren’t grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude. 

And what is expected is not often thought of as a gift. 

Having moved to the Midwest from the East Coast where we would annually drive just  a few hours to the shore and experience the Atlantic, I find that when I travel to someplace near an ocean, which now takes much longer by air or car, I experience it with a renewed sense of wonder.  

Yet on a vacation to Mexico where my husband and I stayed for a week at a resort adjoining a beach on the Pacific Ocean, I felt the sense of wonder seeping from me as time passed.  I realized after just a few days that the ocean had become mundane, an ordinary scene. I was growing disappointed and began chiding myself for letting that happen.  So, I decided to intentionally study it, and each day I wrote down my impressions into a small notebook. In doing so, I saw something new each time I sat on the beach or our balcony and watched the vibrant water.  One day I saw the swirling froth of a wave develop into a sudden paisley pattern that quickly disappeared. Another day I was surprised by a school of flat, fluttery creatures, perhaps stingrays or skates.  Sounds I heard: rumbling, splashing, crashing, growling, grumbling, thundering, swooshing.

The close call occurred during a difficult period in my life.  After numerous phone calls, online searches, and trips out East from Iowa to help family members a thousand miles away, I began to wonder why I was alive.  Life had become exhausting and harsh.  One brother had been injured in a car accident.  Because another family member living nearby had experienced a grievous crisis (which I was also assisting with), I was left in charge of caring for my injured brother, as well as clearing out and selling the family house we had grown up in.

Following my near crash it seemed as if I had been sent an angel like Clarence in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life.  Clarence intercepts George Bailey’s attempted suicide and demonstrates to him his significance through a Christmas Eve journey that positively transforms George’s perception of his life.  

I didn’t travel with an angel, and I wasn’t thinking about harming myself, but a small sunlit ember cast a warming glow throughout my being when I realized that I had been spared.  I fully knew that I matter, and I felt profoundly and personally that God loves me and that my life must have a good purpose.   

I began to consider the gift of life and the joys contained in each day. My refreshed understanding has propelled me towards savoring and more greatly appreciating everyday things: long meals with family, walking in fresh snow, compassionate breezes caressing my cheeks. I’ve become more grateful for the times when family members and I travel from the store or to Africa and make it safely.  These are gifts that fill my days. 

My hope is that I will continue to recognize them for what they are throughout the lulling cadence of common days and when blinded by pain or weariness. 

Janet Skiff has been crafting poems since childhood and holds an MFA in writing with a focus on creative nonfiction. She delights in blending the two genres. For decades she taught language arts in a variety of settings and led a writing workshop for formerly incarcerated people. She devotes much of her time now to writing and travel. Several of her poems have been chosen for Iowa City’s Poetry in Public program. Other work has appeared in Lyrical Iowa, The Daily Palette, and The Corona Silver Linings Anthology. Janet lives in Iowa City, IA with her husband Fred.

 Quantum Paradox

Love is spooky action at a distance.
Just noticing me, you will change my spin.
I, sensing you, can put up no resistance,
but turn to meet your gaze, yang to your yin.

So is our strange entanglement a proof
that love is God, and that He’s near and far—
unseen but irresistible, aloof.
To pluck a flower is to trouble a star.

Our love, unbounded by the speed of light,
can fill the boundless cosmos with its might.

Glenn Wright is a retired teacher living in Anchorage, Alaska with his wife, Dorothy, and their dog, Bethany. He writes poetry to sort out his thoughts, sometimes to celebrate what delights him, occasionally to keep from driving his fist through the drywall. His work has recently appeared in Rumen, Muse, Orchards Poetry Review, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Gemini Magazine, and other journals.

Feathers and Redbirds

I walk the beach and look
for feathers and sit on my patio
eager for a red bird sighting—
there hasn’t been one yet—
perhaps a cardinal or tanager, even
a red-breasted robin—just a little red
on the bird counts, I tell myself.
A woman I trust to tell me Truth told
me the day you crossed the Veil to be
on the lookout for
feathers and redbirds for, she said,
she was told to be watchful and she was and
the fruit of her labors paid off.
I’ve found feathers—three—
on the beach near the 17th street jetty
since that day 6 months ago; that stretch
of beach where, when we still were We,
I so often walked–
3 miles east—at sunrise to watch the sun kiss
the gulf good morning and
I prayed in gratitude
for another day with you and for sobriety and grace
and then, afterward,
when I found myself drawn there again,
for a feather.
I tell myself—for I must—you left
those feathers for me to chance upon.
Still no red bird at the place I’m
most often found—for now—yet I
tell myself no matter the redbird’s
absence the feathers are proof of
you yet,
still,
considering how much you loved red
I thought…yet,
still,
I have three feathers.

Jillian Bain is a recent widow learning to navigate life without her beloved. Her education involves a lot of walks in Nature and on the beach listening for that still, small Voice to direct her path, all the while keenly watching for feathers and red birds.