Amethyst Review

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

1. Quiet yourself and imagine dropping down into the dark abundant well of your soul. 
2. Silently read the poem completely through once.
3. Read the poem out loud.
4. Slowly read the poem again silently, savouring the phrases, the words, the feel, the taste of it.
5. On a blank piece of paper or on a page in your journal, complete the following:
   1. The first image that arose in me as I read this poem was…
   2. My immediate feelings after reading this poem are…
   3. The reality that has been unearthed for me by reading this poem is…
   4. If I were to paint a picture about this poem I would include my work of art…
   5. If I were to add a line of my own somewhere in this poem it would be…
6. Read the poem out loud again, but this time as a prayer to God.
7. Sit in silence to see if God has a response to make to you.
8. End with your own prayer or poem of thanksgiving.

Poems about prayer include:

• ‘Prayer (I)’ – George Herbert;
• ‘Prayer’ – Carol Ann Duffy;
• ‘Poem 133: The Summer Day’ – Mary Oliver;
• ‘Praying’ – Mary Oliver;
• ‘Prayer is like watching for the kingfisher’ – Ann Lewin.

Prayer-poems include:

• ‘Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart, three-person’d God’ – John Donne;
• ‘Eleven Addresses to the Lord: 3’ – John Berryman;
• ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend’ – Gerard Manley Hopkins;
• ‘Conversations: 2’ – Tasos Leivaditis;
• ‘Conversations: 3’ – Tasos Leivaditis.

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.

We Will Always be Blind to Our Current Predicament
 
 
At my great, great grandson’s wedding
where, if I make it I will be 140;
we will be served the moon --
 
a magical pudding that never sets;
like Jesus turning water into wine,
 
the moon gets reborn over and over.
The guests sleepier and sleepier.
Every spoonful the last bite of a thanksgiving feast.
 
The red sands surging forward and back;
forward,
back.
 
All moisture gone, long gone –
 
The birds poke, poke, poking
at the moonrock morsels lazily dropped,
knowing that there is always more, more, more –
 
The moon, hallowed moon,
beautiful bone-dry moon,
sustain us on this blessed day.

Mark LaMonda is an artist and writer who lives in Santa Clarita California. His work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Lullwater Review, January House and is forthcoming in Tough Poets Review, Shadow and Sax, and South Florida Poetry Journal

Sunflower

A sunflower
keeps her eyes trained
on the keeper of light,
lets the warmth cascade
like a chiffon sundress
hanging off her 
poised shoulders,
leafy palms 
open to receive.

She tilts
as the light 
climbs up the sky,
drinking in her portion,
sharing its shine.
Then her gaze falls
until fire meets
the horizon
and lowers beneath
the open plains,
the keeper’s presence
stretching across the west
in blood orange,
then pink lemonade,
until the earth sips
its last drops.

The sunflower doesn’t
hang her head in sorrow.
She carries the name
of the one who sustains,
and with expectant hope,
turns back toward the east
and waits.

Though she cannot see it in the night,
she knows the light is still there–
gliding under the earth,
lifting new mercies toward
the hem of morning,
filling her cup again
at the day’s birth.

Micaela Meyer is a poet from Modesto, California whose work unfolds in conversation with God and the writers of Scripture. Her work has appeared in Inkwell by Christianity Today and Agape Review.

Moments of Zen (A Ghazal)


“Zen is a matter of character, not a matter of intellect.”
                                                         Sam Hamill


Beginners’ mind insight, mirror for Zen.
Intuitive eye, pointing light to Zen. 

Breathing in breathing out, I know I am 
heart listening tonight, feeling Zen. 

Thoughts, feelings green light traffic passing through,
no self-seen, none to fight, full of Zen. 

No coming, no going, no death to fear
buds and peat repeat flight, dharma of Zen. 

Water wearing waves as all-weather clothes. 
Silent sitting, mindful sight of Zen.

Blood orange sunset melting in the sea,
transcending day, including night, art of Zen. 

My wind holds all I love right here, right now
no notions, no concepts, enlightened Zen. 

Michael J. LaFrancis has been a trusted advisor to business, government, education and technology leaders and teams for over 20 years as they design, develop, implement and manage strategies to become more responsive to those they serve. He has worked for global technology leaders including Red Hat (IBM), Gartner and Digital Equipment. He has a B.A. in Psychology from Saint Leo (FL) University, is a graduate of the Organization and Systems Development Program at the Gestalt Institute in Cleveland.

The Taste of Salt

My grandmother kept a small glass dish of salt on her windowsill. Not the kind you shake over food. This salt was grey and coarse, the colour of Baltic fog, and she never explained it except once, when I was about seven, when she pressed three grains into my palm and said, ‘Taste. That’s what the sea remembers.’

I didn’t know then that this was theology. I only knew that she said it in the same tone she used for practical things — how to tell if jam had sealed properly, how to fold linen so it would lie flat in the cupboard, how to spot rain before it showed itself. The sacred, in her kitchen, never arrived with ceremony. It came disguised as instruction.

She was not, by any formal measure, a religious woman. She did not attend church. She did not pray aloud. She crossed herself occasionally when a siren passed — reflexively, the way you blink — and she kept a small icon of the Theotokos in the kitchen cupboard behind the flour, hidden as if she were protecting it from dust, or perhaps protecting herself from explanation. But she handled the salt with a deliberateness that I now recognise as ritual. Each Friday morning she would empty the dish, rinse it, dry it carefully with the corner of a tea towel, and refill it from a cloth bag she kept in the drawer beneath the stove. Her hands moved slowly. She was attending to something.

I am thinking about this now because I am living in a city where I do not speak the language gracefully, and last Tuesday I found myself standing in a supermarket aisle holding a canister of sea salt for longer than any purchase warrants. The label was in Danish. The salt was from the Limfjord. Around me people moved with the briskness of people who know exactly what they need, and I stood still as if I had been asked a question. I did not buy it. I stood there until my arm ached, and then I put it back and went home and sat on the floor of my kitchen for a while.

I am not sure what I was doing there on the floor. It was not praying, exactly. It was something closer to waiting, or listening, or trying not to look away from a feeling that had arrived without warning. Which may be the same thing.

My grandmother came from a village on the Black Sea coast. I have seen photographs: white stone, fig trees, laundry caught in sea-wind, the water behind everything like a held breath. She left as a young woman and spent the rest of her life in a landlocked city, which I think is a specific kind of exile that has no proper name. She spoke of the sea rarely, and when she did it was almost always in practical terms — the damp that ruined cupboards, the fish scales underfoot in the market, the taste of tomatoes grown near salt air. But once, late in her life, when memory had begun to loosen and drift, she said, very softly, ‘You never stop missing a horizon.’

When she died, the glass dish and the icon behind the flour were the only things I asked for. The icon I can explain — it is beautiful, its gold worn thin at the Madonna’s cheek from decades of being touched or almost touched, of being kept close. The salt dish I cannot explain. I took it because it felt necessary in the way that certain objects become necessary: not for what they are but for what they have witnessed. It still has a tiny bubble in the glass near the rim, an imperfection you can feel with your thumb if you know where to find it.

There is a tradition in some Orthodox households of blessing salt and keeping it as a protection, a sanctification of the ordinary. I learned this years after her death, in a book about domestic religious practice in Eastern Europe. I read the passage three times, quietly, alone, feeling something I would not yet call grief and would not yet call recognition, but which was some compound of both. She may have known this tradition. She may have inherited it from her own grandmother without knowing its origin story. She may have simply liked the ceremony of it — the weekly emptying, the rinsing, the refilling — as a rhythm that held time in place when other things would not hold.

Or she may have known precisely what she was doing and chosen not to explain it, because some things are explained by being done and not by being said. She was like that with other kinds of love as well. She never told us she worried; she sent us home with extra food. She never said she forgave anyone; she set another plate at the table. She never announced belief. She made room for it.

I have been thinking about what it means to carry a practice without carrying its doctrine. My grandmother’s salt was sacred — I am certain of this, though I cannot entirely say why — but it was not doctrinal in any neat sense. It did not belong to a theology she could have laid out in propositions. It belonged to her hands, her window, her Friday mornings, the particular slant of winter light in that kitchen. It was the shape that whatever she believed took in the world.

I find myself doing something similar and being uncertain whether to call it faith. I light a candle before I write. Not always, but when I need something to feel different from an ordinary task. I make tea slowly, measuring it out with more care than the situation demands. I keep a stone from a beach in Jutland on my desk — not a pretty stone, just a grey one, rounded and unremarkable — because I picked it up on the day I understood that I was going to stay in this country. That day needed marking. The stone became the mark.

None of this is prayer in any sense I was taught. But it rhymes with prayer, the way a shadow rhymes with the thing that casts it. It asks for attention. It makes a small clearing in the day. It says: this mattered; stay here a moment; do not rush past what is trying to become visible.

In the supermarket, holding the salt, I think I was trying to locate something my grandmother never lost and I have never had cleanly: a sense that ordinary matter can be inhabited by something beyond itself. That a dish on a windowsill can be a threshold. That the grey, coarse, fog-coloured salt of the Baltic is not different in kind from the salt she carried in a cloth bag from a village beside a sea she was never going to see again.

I think, too, that I was lonelier than I had admitted. Loneliness has a way of disguising itself as distraction, as tiredness, as the inability to decide which brand of salt to buy. In a country where even small transactions can leave me feeling slightly misplaced, I have begun to understand how much of belonging is made of repeated gestures: the cup placed on the same shelf, the scarf hung on the same hook, the hand reaching for the same ingredient. Ritual is not always a ladder to heaven. Sometimes it is just the thing that teaches the body it is safe to remain where it is.

She tasted the world and found it sacred — not in spite of its weight but because of it. The salinity of things. The way loss is held in matter. The way a dead woman’s hands can still instruct you, twenty years later, in a kitchen in a country she never imagined, when you are sitting on the floor for reasons you cannot explain, waiting for your breathing to slow, waiting for the room to become itself again.

I ordered the salt from the Limfjord online that evening. It arrived two days later in a brown paper bag folded neatly at the top. I poured some into the glass dish and set it on the windowsill. For a moment nothing happened, which is to say everything happened exactly as it usually does: the kettle clicked off, a bus sighed at the corner, someone laughed in the courtyard below. But the room felt fractionally altered, as if a note I could not hear had begun to sound again.

I have not yet emptied it and rinsed it and refilled it. I have, however, touched it in passing. I have stood by the window with my coffee and looked at it as if expecting instruction. It is Friday morning now, and the dish is catching a thin band of light. I think of my grandmother’s hands, dry and capable, and of the sentence she pressed into my palm with those three grains all those years ago. Taste. That’s what the sea remembers.

Maybe that is all a ritual ever does: teach remembrance to the body. Teach us that some things can be held without being solved. That grief does not always ask for language. That the sacred may enter not as revelation but as repetition — a dish, a window, a handful of salt, a life made bearable by the small faithful acts we continue, even when we are no longer certain who first taught them to us, or why.

Dale Phillips is a certified mindfulness instructor and interfaith chaplain in Denver, Colorado, where he facilitates contemplative practices in healthcare settings.

The Desire

to be both
ductile and resistive
to glow incandescent
and light a dark way
to honor

is owing to memories
of our heavenly home:
they elude recollection
yet they hold
the planet together

they keep the city
from exsanguination
the family from selling
its young or killing
the inconvenient old

as spring’s blaze
of black cherry in bloom
in a cloud of bees
even unremembered
diminishes winter.

J. S. Absher is a poet and independent scholar. His first full-length book of poetry, Mouth Work (St. Andrews University Press) won the 2015 Lena Shull Competition of the NC Poetry Society. His second full-length collection, Skating Rough Ground was published by Kelsay Press in 2022. Chapbooks are Night Weather (Cynosura, 2010) and The Burial of Anyce Shepherd (Main Street Rag, 2006). He lives in Raleigh, with his wife, Patti. Website: www.jsabsherpoetry.com

Weltschmerz 

If now and then the world pain visits you,
you’re blessed. Some live with it each second of
the day and wake to it a dozen times
each night and dream in its grip while asleep:
a lipstick model, say, who’s tongue-tied, and
the gun-shy hunter, and the child who wakes
up from a restless nap in No Man’s Land.
Then there’s the sufferer whose life is bland
or even fortunate, but nothing makes
the pain abate, heat rising from the sand
of peerless skin in waves, cold in the deep
caves of the heart, wracked in the skull by chimes
and gongs and voices from below, above—
a shell in which a grain of nacre grew.

Dan Campion is the author of Calypso (1981), A Playbill for Sunset (2022), The Mirror Test (2024), Star Anchors (2026), and Peter De Vries and Surrealism (1995) and is a co-editor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (1981, 2nd ed. 1998, 3rd ed. 2019). Dan’s poetry has appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Able Muse, Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, THINK, and many other magazines.

“Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to..."

God said, knowing full well he couldn’t, 
knowing how, even millennia from then, no-one 
with the best of telescopes that science could muster
would have more than an estimate,

the whole teeming cosmos expanding beyond 
anyone’s ken but His, knowing even
the pulsing, expanding force lying cloaked
in the darkness in between, that deep

interstellar blackness He wrapped about Himself
as He reached down and passed through
Abram’s vulture-infested sacrifice, took
full burden of covenant in His onyx stride, 

pulling black holes and supernovae around Him,
stars piercing His side with radiant light.
Looked inside the vacuum that was Abram, said,
“You shall have no God but me. You will fail 

like every smouldering star you see.
All the same, I Will Be.”

Matthew Pullar is a Melbourne-based poet. He has had poems published in Ekstasis, Poems for Ephesians, Amethyst Review, Heart of Flesh and Reformed Journal. His latest collection, This Teeming Mess of Glory, was published in 2025 by Wipf & Stock.