Amethyst Review

Walsingham’s Tales 

I took a sip of cider.

The flavor coated my throat, dry of everything but coffee and convenience-store sandwiches. The light outside was dim, and the subtle murmurs of pilgrims and other visitors permeated the room. I lay plastered in a compact room with a bed, a desk, and little more. After a long day on the road, I had finally allowed myself a break. Maybe it was the effects of alcohol on an empty stomach, but, while lying down in the bed, I smiled like an idiot. For by being here, I proved to myself—and to my parents back in London—the adult I could be.

“I really made it,” I said aloud, forgetting at once all the fatigues and worries of the day. For a moment, I basked in this reality.

The day had started with a morning train from London to King’s Lynn, in East England, where I then exchanged the rails for the roads, taking a taxi to Little Walsingham, the “English Nazareth,” at Norfolk. Quite the epithet, earned after Lady Richeldis de Faverches (a local noblewoman) reportedly had a vision back in the second half of the eleventh century where she was shown the house of the Annunciation in Nazareth and commanded to build a replica. A pilgrimage center that didn’t survive Henry VIII and the religious troubles of the sixteenth century.

Despite that loss, Walsingham caught my eye as a place where the old medieval faith had made a small comeback, with pilgrimages resumed at the end of the nineteenth century, and new shrines erected by both Catholics and Anglicans. I had planned this trip as soon as my family bought the tickets to England for that September. Although it is something one wouldn’t say out loud, in my mind, I was picturing this side trip as a consolation in British skin after not going to Lourdes a couple of years ago when visiting France. But I knew well the other, hidden reason waiting for me in the English countryside: I needed to prove to myself that I could escape the comforting claws of a family vacation by going my own way, apart from the main dish of that voyage, London. It’s difficult to explain. It was a weird time for me, a man in his early twenties, with all the angst and childish desire to be a “real adult” (whatever that meant). I resented the idea of merely following after my parents’ travel agenda, the proxy of a much larger fear of being a child in an adult’s world, with not a clue about what to do.

Religion, in that sense, became my scapegoat: my sister wouldn’t dare “waste” a weekend in the countryside, just for her older brother’s religious whims. I knew that my parents wouldn’t leave her alone in the big city. It was the perfect excuse to go on my own, something which was never flat-out demanded, and yet, silently understood by everyone.

“Call us when you arrive,” my mother said when I left the hotel room in London that morning, the outside clothed in the gray opaqueness of September. She was the only other one who was fully awake, ready to see me off. I could sense her nerves.

“And take a lot of photos!”

And a lot of photos would be taken.

The first universal rule about traveling is that no matter how thorough your plans are, something is always going to go awry. In my case, problems started when my card was rejected while trying to buy a baguette and juice at one of the train stops. Without data and lacking any Wi-Fi hotspot to try to see what was wrong with my card, I hoped that enough businesses in what was by then a mostly cashless England would accept cash. They wouldn’t, in that station café, forfeiting any plans for lunch.

After deciding to take my chances and continue my way—hoping to survive off the lodge’s breakfast if worse came to worst—I managed to arrive by late afternoon in Walsingham, riding the last stretch of the way with a Romanian taxi driver, our mutual non-native English accents not getting in the way of conversation. Time flowed slower in this little village of narrow streets and buildings older than some countries. Few people were outside by that hour, and the sun was setting already, promising an early evening.

I was too tired to go out of town to visit the Catholic National Shrine, just recently promoted to the rank of basilica by the late Pope Francis. So, after checking in at my lodge, the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, I satisfied myself with a walk around the village. I entered one of the few shops still open: a religious store, no denominational marker at first glance. It was cramped as only a religious bookstore could be, its different shelves stuffed with crosses, wall decorations with Bible verses, statuettes in wood, plastic, and stucco of the Virgin and baby Jesus, of bearded or veiled saints of centuries past, even of demure Saint Joseph, always of few words. And of course, Bibles. Headlining the ensemble, a row of black tomes with gilded letters: Holy Bible: King James Version. I stopped short, like I had found a penguin in an aviary.

It was difficult to distinguish between Anglicans and Catholics in Walsingham, credal identities thinned by a shared aesthetic sensibility bound to surprise newcomers. In this little shop geographically in the middle of Anglican and Catholic churches, an ecumenical buffet was only to be expected.

“So, is this store Anglican or Catholic?” I asked the cashier, ready to pay for a statuette of Our Lady of Walsingham, small enough to carry in my backpack.

“Actually, we are Baptists,” the woman said, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many times she answered that same question.

There was something for everyone here in this nook of East England.

The next day, I woke up early to enjoy the benefits of free breakfast in the pilgrim lodge. It was a calm morning, and I let myself take my time to find the dining hall within the complex. I noticed the poles distributed through the courtyard, signaling the stations of the cross, each one marked with a Roman numeral and reliefs of the Passion not any different from the ones I would find in a Catholic church. After getting my fill of eggs, beans, sausages, and coffee at the hall (and concluding that the hate on English breakfast is overdone), I was ready to start the day. It was time to visit the Catholic National Shrine.

Walsingham was small enough to make it impossible to really get lost, and yet, I found myself asking for directions at the local Catholic church.

“Walk until you reach the bus stop, and then continue to the left.”

Right. Easy enough.

Walking five minutes uphill, I had already reached the outskirts of the village, where a small Orthodox chapel was starting to bloom, away from the prying eyes of most tourists. I continued upward for one minute, reaching the “bus stop,” with three or so buses in a prairie and heaps of pilgrims crowding the area. That was my cue to go left.

Aside from the distant sounds of cars, all was calm. The soft serenade of air, the touch of a mild sun, and the vast expanse of fields only interspersed by tree-lines filling the horizon. Only splashes of country manors and the red contours of the Catholic Shrine inhabited this portrait of English countryside. Walking that path, soon leaving behind the remnants of the village, this last reminder of civilization felt like stepping into a journey of my own to obtain from it a mute assurance that I was a real adult, always with an elusive definition to escape me.

I couldn’t help thinking about my family. That day, they were going shopping at London. I wondered if they were okay, a pang of uncertain guilt—more the product of overthinking than of reflected remorse—spurring me to try and reassure myself: no moral treatise ever condemned taking a solo-trip far from one’s own family. Besides . . . if there was a certitude to have, it was that my sister would have hated coming down here. But maybe I was just making justifications, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t being antipathic to my family. Perhaps I was just someone who had missed his teenage rebellion, now trying to wash away my fears of a nascent adulthood with this coat of pious travel. 

After about fifteen minutes of an uninterrupted dirt pathway, I turned to the left onto a downhill slope that connected to the basilica. Soon I reached the Slipper Chapel, the oldest building within the complex and a late-medieval survivor of the Reformation, welcoming me in with its strong and well-defined stone façade. I mentioned before the aesthetic similarities between Catholics and Anglicans in Walsingham, but there was something that had differentiated the two in my mind: the color. I came to associate the Anglican shrine with a regal and calm deep blue, the same color of the robes of Our Lady of Walsingham, but also present in a multitude of small ways throughout their shrine, such as the backgrounds for their reliefs of the Stations of the Cross. The Catholic shrine, instead, became fixed in my head with a mix of warm brick-red and hardened grey, first from the village church where I had asked for directions, and then from the faraway glimpse of the basilica and its newer chapel of Our Lady of Reconciliation. It wasn’t until I entered the Slipper Chapel that my easy categorizations came to naught once again.

Inside, the room was awash in multicolor lights reflecting against white walls, sunlight filtering through kaleidoscopic stained-glass windows. An altar of gilded wood and blue backgrounds stood beside a statue of Our Lady of Walsingham with the infant Jesus on her lap. The two were vested in royal paraphernalia of crowns and scepters, and seated upon a throne. The Queen Mother wore robes of red and blue, the same deep blue that I had solely attributed to the Anglicans. I soaked in the beauty for a moment, like I was partaking in a lineage of pilgrimages stretching back centuries, a look back into what had been before the turbulences of the sixteenth century,  a look that made me wonder and ache a second for what was lost.

And yet, here they stood. The basilica, the chapel, and Walsingham.

I took my time meandering around the complex, relatively full of Indian families resting in the benches spread throughout the courtyard. It was calm as a slow Saturday afternoon: there were no more Masses for the rest of the day, and the on-site cafeteria offered only a handful of pastries to go with the tea.

A part of me was disappointed at not having that cinematic experience; you know, the heartfelt conversion, tears flowing freely while kneeling before the tabernacle, before Jesus, a pious passion overwhelming the senses and giving my life a renewed purpose and direction. But I was never the sentimental type.

Nonetheless . . . I felt peace while drifting in the compound, walking in the soft sun-sprinkled hallways and corridors of the Shrine; nothing to do, except being. I paused from worrying about my family and my goal of “proving myself” to them. Instead, my thoughts were flooded with optimism, imagining that they too might have enjoyed themselves here with me.

The day was coming to a close, and my time in the Basilica, and Walsingham, was nearing its end. There was no golden goose of adulthood in those red halls and yet, I felt the weight of tomorrow lift off of my shoulders, at least for today. For perhaps, by merely arriving here in this place withdrawn from the noise of the world, I was already looking at tomorrow, my tomorrow, one step at a time.

Eduardo Jáuregui is a writer from Irapuato, Mexico, now based in Southern California. He enjoys brewing coffee, reading books of long-dead authors, and writing about faraway worlds and melancholic protagonists. Right now, he is finishing his debut novel, set in a Colonial-Mexico-inspired fantasy setting where ghosts and the scars of the past abound. He has been published in Kelp Journal’s The Wave, Pelican’s Plume and Academy of the Heart and Mind. You can follow him on Instagram at @eduardo_ajm.

The Edge of Hope

It is enough 
to touch the sky 
at two sides

after the singing 
wrens are full

to watch them 
when they have gone
and hear their joy
without them

to raise a bowl
as if it could sing 

to be an offering
until it is the song  
I hope to be.

Joseph Tetro lived in Alaska for several years, receiving his MFA from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. His work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in La Rotonde, The Reprise, Empyrean, Phil Lit, and elsewhere. He co-manages Winter Light Books (https://www.winterlightbooks.com), which works with Ukrainian artists to publish children’s books based on folktales from Ukraine.

It Has Always Been Yours

There are women across those hills,
desert women, a mess of shining.
Flesh hotter than coals, the 
scent of bodies most earthly.
I hear they make fire when they
dance.

Good men do not travel beyond those hills,
the edge of this, the land of my father, 
the end of the world.
We don’t dance.
Certainly, no one ever danced for me.

Each morning, the same dream.
Foggy valleys full of wine, a face like a door, 
giving itself to my probing, speaking a foreign tongue
saying, “I see you, good son, keeper of crops, bringer of gold”

I drape the carpet of duty
once more across the cave of my body. 
Today, we will count the sheep.  I will tend
my father’s barley. I will make the meager
gifts suffice. 

I will present it all. And then, perhaps, a 
fatted calf for me, a moment to salve the bruise
of being.  It is only fair. 
What is love that is not fair?

I stretch blameless limbs to earning
in the long shadows of every morning.
Every morning, I fear a familiar stranger 
bearing in his guilty arms injustice, running toward home,
crying “father”.

Dean Abbott is a writer, poet and pastoral counselor living in Kentucky. He can be contacted through http://www.deanabbott.com or on X @deanabbott.

   House of Heaven
                             “My favorite house is my mother”
					   Haya Alyan

Sometimes, when caught in the jaws 
of fear or trouble, I talk with my mother 
in a quiet room in my heart. We are in a house 
where I have never lived but which I know well—
chintz armchairs, a fireplace, a four-poster bed, 
and large, mullioned windows cranked open 
on woods and fields. And my last cat, alive 
in his plush tuxedo, there on the window 
seat overlooking all that green. I understand 
that this is heaven, though I do not know 
why I am allowed to see it now, no distance 
here between dead and living hearts. My mother 
is in the room, and I am, too, though I am also 
in my world, so far away from hers. I ask 
her questions, seeking reassurance, and she tells 
me exactly what I need to know. Our voices blur 
inside my body until I cannot tell if what I understand 
is my own wisdom or what she has become in me, 
these sixty years since her death. But that doesn’t 
really matter. What matters is that she is here 
and I am, too. My heart is in my body. 
And my body knows what it knows. 
Night comes and goes, dawn pinks the sky, 
the cat sleeps, wakes, purrs his bass rumble. 
And still we talk. I am always rested in this place 
where everything is holy and everything is safe, 
the rise and fall of our voices like quiet music 
reminding me that all shall be well, no matter 
what happens. I trace the stitches in her patchwork 
quilt the way I did as a girl, everything so real 
I can feel my pulse beating in one finger. 
When I rise to leave, she cradles my face 
in her hands for a moment before they drop 
into the wild, blue floral of her skirt, hushed 
as sleeping doves. And then I am alone again, 
my heart my own house, in a different room, 
this other place, where I must live without her.

Alison Townsend’s books include the PEN/America shortlisted memoir, The Green Hour, Persephone in America, and The Blue Dress. Recognized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Essays, she is professor emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Must be a sign


the gardener had said 
when he unearthed my sister’s ring
twenty years buried in mulch.

Now lost again
I stare at the bare flesh of a pinkie
in a washroom in Trafalgar Square.

Panic is electric,
it fizzes capillaries, chest to throat –
I rummage through basin and bin.

Rewind – I remember the rub,
my thumb twiddling silver
in a gallery, a Turner sunrise.

Later, the restaurant slumps,
the trinket slips into our minds,
consumes all conversation.

The train slow motions.
I sit silent,
the Celtic design soft-swirling.

Back home, I exhale,
a chink of silver rolls over laminate,
mystery circling my feet.

Kate Young’s poetry has been published in journals including Stand, Fly on the Wall, Alchemy Spoon and Poetry Scotland. It can be heard on the Podcast Poetry Worth Hearing. Fear was placed 2nd in The Canterbury Poet of the Year Competition, 2022. Her pamphlets A Spark in the Darkness and Beyond the School Gate have been published by Hedgehog Press. 
Find her on X @Kateyoung12poet or her website kateyoungpoet.co.uk

Parousia

Yet it was you who took me from the womb; 
you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.
—Psalm 22:9

You formed me then pushed me 
out of darkness through a narrow gate
between temple pillars—into life. 

Nuzzled between mountains,
I heard prophets beyond the peaks 
speak of you, label you distant 
and unseen, theirs alone 
to deliver. Come, they called—
We will show you the way. 

But you, with a still, small silence
spoke inside my bones 
and marrow: find yourself—and me—
in the desert, not the prophets.

So, I descended the crag,
stone by stone, into hush of darkness, 
where I wandered and slept 
twenty-seven years.

You shook me awake 
with a mighty earthquake. 
Crazed with thirst, I wandered 
and searched until fatigue 
sat me in a shittah’s thin mercy.

Sparrows arrived—tiny witnesses—
and perched above me. 
You whispered through their wings:
Stop searching—I never lost you. 

Howard S. Carman, Jr., Ph.D., is a retired physical chemist in Blountville, TN, USA. He published his first poetry collection, But Now I See: Rhymes and Reflections in 2017. Recent poetry appears in Tennessee Voices Anthology, Black Moon Magazine, Abyss & Apex, Braided Way Magazine, and Troublesome Rising Digital Anthology. He serves on the Board of Directors of Poetry Society of Tennessee and is an editor of Tennessee Voices Anthology.

God’s word to his creation (a Cento)	

I give you every seed-bearing plant on earth

every tree that has fruit 

to everything that has the breath of life in it

I give every green plant for food.

sing a new song

you who go down to the sea

Leviathan, formed to frolic in it

wild animals and all cattle



creeping things and flying birds

not one of these shall fail



not one shall lack her mate

for My mouth has commanded it

let everything that breathes
    
     offer praise 

ask the beasts
if they keep silent, the stones will cry out

the stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons


turtledoves, swallows, and cranes
    
     observe the time of their migration

I will make a covenant on that day

with the beasts, the birds, and the creeping things of the ground

and all flesh will see salvation

who let the wild donkey go free?
I untied his ropes

Genesis 1:29-30 NIV Isaiah 42: 10 NCB

Psalm 148: 10 NCB Psalm 104: 26 NIV

Psalm 150: 6 NCB Isaiah 34: 16 NKJV

Job 12: 7 KJV L uke 19: 40 NCB

Jeremiah 8: 7 NIV Ecclesiastes 18: 22

Hosea 2: 18 NLT Luke 3: 6 KJV

Job 39: 5 ICB

Barbara Usher cares for retired ewes who bring their lambs at foot, and ex-commercial hens on her animal sanctuary, Noah’s Arcs (barbaraushernoahsarcs.com). Her poetry has been published in various journals including Amethyst Review, Last Stanza (Editor’s pick) and in anthologies including Thin Places & Sacred Spaces. She is the representative for the Fife Stanza of the Poetry Society, and led a workshop at the St Andrews International Literary Festival in 2026. She is co-editing an anthology Crossings: writings from Fife and Edinburgh, which will be published in November 2026.

Olive Branch


I would have reached
through the hatch in the ark
for the bird to take him
in with me, so tired
from his fruitless flight

I would have held
him in the hold of that dark
coupling place a little
longer, so tired
of the anxious nights

adrift. I would have kissed
his head as he departed
once again in search
of a sign, so hopeful
was I. He escaped sight.

I would have grasped
the tender peace from his sharp
beak, cried to the animals
We are saved, so sure
my dove would steer us right

home. I wouldn’t have
had a clue how to chart
my own course to dry land
and build again, completely new,
but he flew, and I had to, and it’s alright.

Gina Pribaz, MFA, lives and writes in Rome, Italy, where she studies theology at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas and serves as editor for the student magazine, La Parola. She is the founder of the With All Your Heart Catholic Writing Workshop. Her poetry has appeared in Presence and is forthcoming at the Catholic Poetry Room, and her published essays have won awards (National AWP award, Best of the Net, Pushcart nomination).

Sea Roses and Bendy Old Tree Roots

We walked along a wiggly path
to nowhere in particular:
to the pristine town, maybe,
or to the red-capped lighthouse, certainly,
while out in the Atlantic, sparks of light 
glinted at us, most definitely -
a full sky reminder

That we once played on those jumbles of rocks --
algaed fairy pools between them,
filling up and emptying out in a rush --
as if we would not wrinkle or gray,
as if immortal,
part of the infinite ocean
salting our bodies
in a hearty brine.

Emily Alston-Follansbee (she/her) wrote her first poem, entitled “Love,” on a tiny piece of paper in 1972; poetry has always felt like a form of music for her. She was a teacher for many years and she raised two children who became lovely adults. In 2020 Emily developed a neurological illness and she has been disabled since then. She lives in Maynard, Massachusetts with her cheery husband and two goofy dogs. Emily’s writing can be found – or is forthcoming in – Grand Journal, Avalon Literary Review, Freshwater Literary Review, The Words Faire and NOVUS Literary Arts Journal.

Bread
     (Inspired by the movie, Miracle of Marcelino)


Each ascent returned me to the attic where the household had abandoned the crucified figure among dust and broken furniture, as though neglect could diminish the sacred. I never questioned His silence. It resembled waiting. I spoke to Him as one speaks to a friend whose presence requires no reply, and somehow knew I had been heard.

I climbed the stairs carrying a slice of bread. The offering required no faith, only recognition. It seemed impossible that one who had listened so patiently should remain unfed. I held the bread toward Him without hesitation, not as an act of devotion, but as the simplest expression of friendship.

Light entered the carved body. The hand withdrew from nail and timber and reached toward mine. He accepted the bread without surprise, as though we had always known this moment would arrive. Only afterward did I understand that the miracle had begun long before the light. 

Michal Mahgerefteh is an ESL poet and visual artist living in Norfolk, Virginia. Her work explores memory, family, faith, grief, and the quiet revelations of ordinary life. She is the author of six poetry chapbooks and the founder of Poetica Magazine. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies.