New Writing Engaging with the Sacred
Fountain
In the night I see your shining
eyes, and beyond their beauty
a promise of Sabbath fit for the
soul, an inexhaustible fountain
tapping lightly on my shoulder
until it soaks through every cell,
an endless sea curling east as we
converge upon the whitecaps,
a happiness poured back
and forth between friends.
Aisling Cruz is a Midwest-based poet and artist. Her work has recently appeared in Vessels of Light, Gotham Literature, and Oyster River Pages.
When a soundbath stresses you out
because it reminds you of being on hold for DWP.
When you cocoon yourself in the duvet
to make it feel like a retreat but it’s more
Kafka’s Metamorphosis than you expected.
When you play a healing soundscape on
Youtube, in imitation of posh spas,
with jungle drum and bird song. How it mixes
with the sound of your own back garden birds,
sparrow and wood pigeon. Reliable even
if not exotic. Until you can’t
decipher between the real birds and the
recorded real birds. A captured birdsong
no one can copyright that is carried into
future ears years later when the nest is rolled
away and the hedge is cut to its bones. Might
the bird song come later when you
get your one and only lie in that week.
Might one day wellness well up in us
without being contrived; that we take up
our place and hear our body sing in an
accompanied chorus. Might we bathe
in the pool of our humanity and
let acceptance seep in and hug us
as tightly as the big toe fits the tap.
Ryan Service is a full-time priest and sometime poet based in the Midlands (UK), finding his vocation somewhere in between the world and the word. His work has been published in Theology, The Sociological Review and other journals. He received a prize for his entry in the Jack Clemo poetry competition. Before training for the priesthood in Rome he read English at the University of Warwick, where he found the sheer variety of worlds created by authors opened up a way into faith.
Warrior Child
I want to be a warrior…--St. Thérèse of Lisieux
I have trusted with a young trust
that closes eyes and leans hard into hostile space
and the plummet takes on monstrous shapes
of hurt and burn and brittle faith
offset by fierce love for you, spear of iris,
your perfect bloom—
this is the bluff, the bitter lip
where I ask about Joan and Thérèse, all your precious loves
who leak life and lean
cantilevering the cliff of your absence until they slip
the bounds of armor and crag, coughing blood, combusting,
trussed yet trusting—
you open the last door, and you wait inside—what is it to rush
in, though the cathedral collapses—
What is it to hush
my foreboding when like Joan like Thérèse there is a death
you are asking, a slashing
away of the woman, unmasking
the warrior hidden under delicate skin, now pricking alive
and feverish, rising unsteady as
you train my arms for battle, prepare my hands for war, what is it to
touch your face
Laura Reece Hogan is the author of Butterfly Nebula (Backwaters, University of Nebraska Press, 2023), winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, Litany of Flights (Paraclete Press, 2020), winner of the Paraclete Poetry Prize, the chapbook O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line Press), and the nonfiction book I Live, No Longer I (Wipf & Stock). She is one of ten poets featured in the anthology In a Strange Land (Cascade Books). Her poems have appeared in America, Scientific American, Sugar House Review, RHINO, The Christian Century, Verse Daily and elsewhere.
The Mysteries
of a river
at dusk—
the way
its waters
sound
like a song
someone
else
has told
you about—
remain
strangely
consuming,
yet connected.
Alex Missall studied creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. His poetry collection A Harvest of Days is available through Finishing Line Press. His collection Morning Grift is forthcoming through FLP (September 2026). He resides in Ohio. You can find him on X @missall_Poet, or on Instagram @alexmissall.
Resting Cymbals
From the faucet’s drip
in the silent house comes
contemplation’s arrow.
I fold into the couch
when the kids have given up
the animal racket of slight bodies.
A small white plate
in the center of the kitchen
holds the unpeeled orange,
so many wispy ventricles.
The fallen petals, its
amphibian skin shed
beneath it. No one dares
to eat its sweet pulse.
Love is also a streak of terror
that makes you aware
of its duties before rest.
That children love so much—
the small kernel in their chests
glowing while they sleep,
I can hardly believe it.
What more is there to see,
Lord, help my unbelief.
Jesse Breite’s recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Tinderbox, Poetry Northwest, Terrain, and Rhino. His first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. Jesse teaches high school in Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives with his wife and two kids. More at jessebreite.com.
Turning Seventy
one month before seventy
moving through a landscape of thanks
for Octobers and Puccini
halves of horse chestnut cases
open and yawning on the sidewalk in autumn sun
delighting in
green mossy paquettes
pantomimes of pufferfish
balloon fish and offspring
locusts and honey
one month before seventy
bearing my witnesses:
the hope of letting go of my stories
each story as common as grass
and reframe regrets as pokerfaced masterpieces to ignore
at seventy I will pull back the curtain
revealing islands of weeping mixed with marionettes of joy
pirouettes of astonishment
trembling, pendulous and grateful
rejoicing in worship everywhere
Liz Nakazawa is the editor of Deer Drink the Moon:Poems of Oregon. This is an anthology of 33 Oregon poets writing nature poems. Her own poetry has appeared in Willawa, Timberline Review, Amethyst Review, ahundredgourds and other publications.
La nostra certezza l’amore di Dio
My eyes wander this small sanctuary
where you are crucified at least
three times. We kill you so often—
I find a bank of electric candles,
light one each day. I miss matches,
but I leave some flickering
contrition, my confessions, before
the statues of saints I don’t know,
to whom I don’t pray. The flawed
can comfort, but can they save?
A carillon rings heavy in the stone walls,
marble holds percussion interwoven
with Bohemian Rhapsody from a passing
car. A woman enters, drops coin after coin
in the offering box, I never see her face.
I relight a candle that stuttered off,
wonder if she left this prayer, if
it caught artificial flame, if it will
burn anyway. I can no longer tell
where burning starts or stops,
which loss is mine or hers.
Nadine Ellsworth-Moran lives in Georgia where she works in full-time ministry while pursuing her love of writing. She hopes to continue listening closely and writing about the shared experience of life in these times, with particular interest in the joys and struggles of coming to understand the history, identity, faith, and culture of the modern South. Her poems have appeared in Valiant Scribe, Structo, Theophron, Rust + Moth, Thimble, Sonic Boom, Emrys, Kakalak, and The Wild Word, among others. She shares her home with her husband and five unrepentant cats.
I Travel
I travel through centuries,
my roots scattered to the winds,
my tomorrows soaring above
canopied forests,
Their splendid carpets of green,
their rising tubular arteries
reaching toward extended hearts
transporting love’s
coming and going.
Yvonne Jayne lives and writes in Hawaii. Her poetry is published in The San Francisco Journal of Hope and Peace, The Harbinger Asylum Literary Journal, Best Poetry, The The Twisted Vine, Western New Mexico University, The Tipton Poetry Journal, and The Aleola Journal of Poetry and Art.
Connections and contemplation in poetry and prayer
There are essentially two kinds of poems about prayer. There are poems addressed to God, which are prayer-poems and also poems about prayer and how we pray.
David Yezzi states that: “Prayers and poems share an uncanny family resemblance. In fact, they look so much alike at times they could be thought of as identical twins separated in childhood.” He notes that, “The common origins of poetry and prayer date back at least to the second millennium B.C., when the two functioned seamlessly as one expression.”
Similarly, Derek Rotty has written that the: “idea of making poetry into prayer has ancient roots, as far back as the choral chants of Greek theater. Yet, it was in the Hebraic tradition that poetry became prayer in a specific way. The Psalms, ancient Hebrew poems mostly attributed to King David, became the prayer book for the worship of the Jewish people. These Psalms contain the gamut of human emotions: from love to despair; from joy to sorry; from cries for protection to cries for mercy after grave sin.”
Roughly 33% of the Bible is poetry, including songs, reflective poetry, and the passionate, politically resistant poetry of the prophets. Six books in the Bible are known as books of poetry: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Lamentations. Job is a story about an innocent man who loses everything but who concedes that God’s wisdom operates at a scale that sometimes we can’t see. Proverbs is a collection of wise sayings from the ancient near east, many of which are associated with the wise King Solomon. Ecclesiastes explores the unpredictability of life. The book of Psalms is a five-volume collection of poems that the Jews used to worship and understand God. The Song of Songs is a romance poem that paints a picture of paradise found in human love. Lamentations is a collection of five dirges, each of which mourns the fall of Jerusalem.
Poet Gideon Heugh notes that: “The Bible brims with the poetic …
When the prophets are speaking out the voice of God, the text switches from prose to poetry. It’s as though the divine utterance is simply too holy, too awesome to be expressed in normal terms.
Words have immense power. In Genesis 1, God speaks creation into being. It isn’t forged or constructed or simply zapped into place. Words create worlds.
Poetry harnesses the creative potency of language. The fullness of words are brought to bear on a single idea, feeling or moment – helping open our eyes and hearts to the depths of life. It can also help us to see life from another person’s perspective … Poetry builds empathy.”
Yezzi goes on to note Jacques and Raïssa Maritain as writing that “very often saintly souls who have had the experience of spiritual things have also received the graceful gift of speaking of it in a beautiful, persuasive and luminous way” and says that “many poems—by Hopkins, Herbert, Donne, Eliot, and others—either take the form of prayers or have [a] prayer-like effect.”
Similarly, Jahan Ramazani argues that “Whether atheist, agnostic, or of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or other heritage, poets frequently both mimic and interrogate prayer. From Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and James Weldon Johnson, to George Oppen, Louise Glück, Agha Shahid Ali, A. K. Ramanujan, and Charles Wright, poets interlace poetry with prayer, drawing on its apostrophe, intimate address, awed colloquy, solemn petition, musical recursiveness, and other features.”
Why is this so? A conference on ‘Poetry and Prayer’ put it like this: “The analogy and continuity between poetry and prayer, the poetical and the mystical, has often been discussed. The psychological mechanism used by grace to raise us to prayer is, Henry Bremond wrote, the same as that set in motion in poetic experience. Both poetry and prayer are rooted in an inner experience of concrete and fundamental values so that both invite, using the language of John Henry Newman, a real rather than a notional assent. Reading a poem can be perceived as a prayerful experience. W.H. Auden wrote: ‘to pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention — on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God — that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.’”
Ellen McGrath Smith notes that many poets: “invoke the spiritual writing of Simone Weil, including her assertion that ‘absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.’ This … broadens the possibility for poetry as prayer, regardless of content, since writing poetry is an act of acute mindfulness.” Weil herself wrote that: “Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry.”
Additionally, Abigail Carroll notes that: “Prayer has often been compared to poetry, and with good reason. Like poetry, prayer emphasizes careful choice of words. Because of the careful, deliberated choices each word represents, the language of prayer, like the language of poetry, carries a greater amount of meaning than casual conversation or mere prose. The words of a prayer are thick with significance, pregnant with possibility. Like poetry, prayer contains pause. In both modes of expression, the silence surrounding words is as important as the words themselves. And in their own ways, both poetry and prayer engage the spirit. They are not merely a fanciful description of beauty on the one hand, and on the other hand, a functional request for the divine provision of needs, but occasions for deeply engaging the soul.”
Gregory Orr says that: “Writing a poem can save your life, and reading a poem can show you that you are not alone. Someone else felt this. Someone else went through what you are going through and they survived, even triumphed. The poem is the proof of that survival and triumph.”
He also suggests that: “The making of poems is the making of meanings. To write a lyric poem is to take the confusion and chaos inside you and translate it into words. When you suffer trauma, you mostly do that passively, as a victim. But when you translate that experience into words and shape it, you become active. You are no longer a passive endurer of experience, but an active shaper of it. You’ve redeemed something from that chaos.”
Finally, Malcolm Guite argues that what we commonly find in poetry are moments of transfiguration; “those moments when the mirror a poem holds up becomes a window into the Divine.” His argument is that poetry often, perhaps because of its very nature and form, goes beyond the comparatively modest task, which Shakespeare ascribed to it in Hamlet, of ‘holding a mirror up to nature,’ by becoming “a window into the mystery which is both in and beyond nature” and that “from that window sometimes shines a more than earthly light that suddenly transforms, transfigures all the earthly things it falls upon.”
Finally, given the links we have explored between poetry and prayer, how can we read poetry in a prayerful manner? Heugh writes about praying through poems suggesting that: “You cannot rush when reading a poem; it forces you to slow down, to dwell, to be present. Because poetry so wonderfully and effectively focuses our attention, it can be a powerful medium through which we can pray.”
Two spiritual exercises involving the reading of poetry incorporate several of these insights and approaches:
Spiritual exercise 1
Choose a poem that focuses on an issue that you think God might be placing on your heart.
Step one – once you have chosen your poem, say a brief and simple prayer inviting the Holy Spirit to speak to you through it.
Step two – read the poem, slowly, and out loud if you can. Once you have finished, note down a particular line or phrase that you find particularly moving or interesting.
Step three – read the poem a second time. Once you have, think of a story or a moment from your own life that this reminds you of. How can you relate the poem to your own experience?
Step four – read the poem for a third and final time. Think of an action that the Holy Spirit might be asking you to take, or change it is asking you to make through the poem.
Step five – pray. Thank God for the poem and for what it has been telling you. Ask God to help you take the action that you considered in the previous step.”
Spiritual exercise 2
Poems about prayer include:
Prayer-poems include:
Jonathan Evens is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell and Area Dean of Basildon. Previously Associate Vicar for HeartEdge at St Martin-in-the-Fields, he was involved in developing HeartEdge as an international and ecumenical network of churches engaging congregations with culture, compassion and commerce. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life written through the prism of Christian belief, and writes regularly on the visual arts and The Arts more generally for national arts and church media including Artlyst, ArtWay and Church Times. He blogs at joninbetween.blogspot.com.
Grace
Does the river forgive the sea
For opening its mouth,
For swallowing the miles
It has travelled and leading it to
A new life in new waters,
Lost to its original self?
And when the branch falls
In the storm, crashes to the ground,
Does the man, seeking firewood
At the end of a season, understand
What has been freely given, does he
Pause to hear the weeping sap?
I hear the wind in the spruce trees,
I see the remnant moon in the sky.
I catch the hint of fire in the sunrise,
I smell the electric promise of storm.
I wait for the grace,
And it comes.
Heather Cameron is a poet with a particular interest in autopathography and elegiac works. Her first collection of poetry, A Random Caller – Cancer Poetry, published by Ginninderra Press, SA in 2023 was completed as part of her creative arts PhD at Deakin University. Cameron writes about the sacred and spiritual in relation to loss and grief, exploring the spaces people travel to during these times.
Amethyst Review 