Amethyst Review

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.

Transcending the Haze

In my mind’s eye, I am at the top of a grassy knoll, my head tilted up, and I am holding out my arms in readiness for the great lift. Caught on the swell of a strong breeze, I’m soaring up into the sky, exhaling as I look down at the awesome country below me. With my hands in prayer position, I head up and up until I reach the summit of a mountain. Here I rest, breathless, looking towards each point of the compass and everything in between, until I can no longer see and there is only that place of imperceptibility where the haze of land meets sky. I have heard this called the thin place.

My childhood was filled with stories and fairytales of pixies, and giants and witches, and the ever-omniscient God at the altar of our church. Therefore, my imagination was rich and prone to exploring all things temporal and spiritual, especially through the conduit of my dreams. I also believed I could transform myself into another being and transcend any place I did not care to linger just by the power of my mind. 

My mother told me that flight was only possible for the birds and bats and a few other clever creatures like flying squirrels and fish, ones that I’d seen on nature programmes on the television. Nevertheless, I believed in my own potential to defy gravity; after all, I was taught that belief was the most important thing, having blind faith. As if to condone this theory, I often heard the adults say, ‘the world is your oyster’, and I believed it, until I tried to test the flesh of that slippery creature and found that the oyster has a very tough shell that is almost impossible to open. 

For me, flight is synonymous with ‘freedom’, a word that consistently filled my adolescent head, and gave me a sense of liberation, from what, I was not sure. Until that point, the nearest I had come to experiencing the sensation of flying, was with the aid of an inflatable rubber ring. Every summer my family would go on holiday to the seaside. It was here, around the age of eight that I learned the art of swimming. At first, Dad would hold my hands, and I would cling on tight while we jumped over the waves in the shallows. I loved to feel the swell coming and going under my feet and the exhilaration of not knowing how big the next wave would be, whether it would roll over my legs or leap up and splash my face. Eventually, all fear subsided, the ring came off, and I trusted my own body to be buoyant enough not to sink. I let go of his hands and experienced the delight of floating in the sea. I found I could move through the water, splashing and swishing my featherless arms. Of course, I was floating not flying.

As I moved into teenagerhood, I became determined to defy gravity, in little ways at first but, no matter how much I tried, I remained landbound. No amount of holding open my longest raincoat and leaping from dune to dune or skipping from boulder to boulder had any effect. At night I’d wake up with a sudden thump and find myself on the bedroom floor. Dreaming about flying was not the same. I became disappointed and depressed and sure that I was forever earthbound, but one day in class the teacher handed out some books for us to read at home and asked us to write a review for our homework. 

My book was Mr Pye by Mervyn Peake. This is what I wrote: In this novel, the protagonist arrives at an island to do his good works in the name of God. As his scheme progresses and he becomes more successful, he starts to feel an itch around the area of his shoulder blades. When he looks in the mirror he sees some fluffy feathers on his back. He tries to rub them off, but they remain. At first, they are like the fluffy down on a newborn chick, but over time they turn to coarse tufts and eventually there are two lines of white feathers growing along the line of each shoulder blade. They keep on growing until they are fully formed wings. They are pure white like the angels’ wings in the stories he tells about heaven. This is very well described by the author, and I believe this is not just a metaphor.

I was entranced by this story, and I wanted to believe it could be true. If I had wings, I’d be able to fly out of the open window, fly away from school, fly anywhere in the world. I’d be a good angel, one that would dash down to help others when they were in trouble. But I was still an adolescent, a sulky one at that. I’m sure if my parents had been aware of my fantasies, they might have considered me more like those more nuanced creatures, like cherubim or seraphim. I wanted to remain human but with wings that could be hidden, folded in a concertina formation between my shoulder blades, and flattened down to appear to be only a slight hump. I refused to have my hair trimmed so that it would grow to cover my back. I was gripped by the idea, at least until I turned thirteen and then I slowly forgot about this episode of my life until now. 

I still dream of flying, and nowadays I do fly, but only after booking a ticket, waiting in a queue to have my passport checked, to be scanned through security, and finally seated in a metal tube with lots of other people. That’s not my kind of flying, not the flying of my dreams. And the only thin place I visit now is after a hike up a steep gradient to gaze up, breathless, at the mountains where I can trace the edges of my world with my eyes and in that way, I let my spirit soar. I know I must leave my ideas of flying to my imagination and let my sleep be the carrier of my dreams. While I remain earthbound, I can still merge with my watery surroundings in the mutual flow of body and mind and let my angel spirit rise.  

Alison Lock connects an inner world with a love of nature through poetry and prose trained as a facilitator of Life Writing for Transformation after studying for an MA in Literary Studies and Creative Writing. Since graduating in 2010 she has published several books and pamphlets of poetry and short stories, as well as a poetic sequence of personal transformation ‘Lure’ broadcast on the BBC Radio 3. She leads regular Poetry for Wellbeing sessions at Conwy Culture Centre.

Julie Sampson’s work is widely published in magazines and anthologies, and has been shortlisted, or highly commended in a variety of competitions (including the Survision James Tate Memorial Prize and Geoff Steven’s Memorial Prize). She edited Mary Lady Chudleigh; Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2009) and has three collections: Tessitura (Shearsman, 2011); It was when it was when it was (Dempsey and Windle, 2018); and Fivestones (Lapwing publications, 2022).

The Good Life is Gardening

Plant and plough, for the hard earth’s hardening.
And remember, in summer, at the ripe fruit’s dearth,
That the good life is gardening.

Soil gives, for sins of bookishness, toil’s pardoning.
In the soul’s fields, idleness cracks the earth—
So plant and plough, for the hard earth’s hardening.

For neighbor-hood, for friendships’ farthering,
Together dig the ground, find the small pea’s worth,
And love. For the good life is gardening.

Our arms grow weak with gold and stocks and garnering,
Garnered for ease, to electrify our hearths,
For plastic plants and ploughs, for the hard earth’s hardening.

From spreadsheets, codes, from white-grey lights—come out! Your tools want sharpening.
You’ve forgotten what it is to watch the ground give birth,
Forgotten the good life is gardening.

When we find concrete cruel, paper work disheartening,
O let us dig, and God’s sweaty, soily mirth,
Let us plant and plough, for this hard earth is hardening—
And let us find, dirt-dusted, the good life in our gardening.

Brendon Sylvester is a poet and teacher. He lives in Pennsylvania, and he serves as poetry editor for the Anselm Society.

Kneel into the mouth of morning

Kneel into the wide open yawn of morning
Touch forehead to floor
How hard of bone meets hard of wood
Cranium winding down 
To the quietest common denominators
Here is where you are safe
Tucked inside the early hour
Day is still dark and woolly
Going through its casual 
Unwrapping before you
Go ahead and have it 
Have all of it
Gift this skinny single jangling silver coined moment to yourself
Allow the slow becoming of now
Just you being 
You and the close vibrations ticking
What you become
When the still rooms of your life
And their fabrications 
Are left to hang untouched in the unnecessarily organized closets
That you are momentarily leaving 
In order to find the place
Where you can float
Separately and enveloped
Turns out this cradle of stillness 
Is all the answer you’ll ever need
Your hands not exactly pressing together to pray but
Not exactly unlike it
Either
Even when you have no interest 
In any of the currently available gods

Ellen Goldbaum Kolin has been writing most of her life and recently started submitting poetry. Her first published poem will be in WailingandGnashing.com.

The Tao to You
 
Early morning, the Tao on a leaf
outside your tongue,
daylight flies cold heart-razors
to vowels on sand, speck, stone—
rivulets and dew can hold
a fortune of trauma.  
 
These days we forage
indoors, for the pulse of blood,
some special peace
that does not depend
on the shape of another’s mouth
--the baby guzzles milk, feels ease--
we gallivant in bedrooms, the living room,
scouring for the still point,
the way to live is the way to live
we slip through the eye of a giggle
and bask in the Tao.
 
I will always sing the words of
the Tao to you
while the wind splits insects outside,
I will meet you
without metaphor,
peace is in the word
and the Tao is the word,
the hum of your babble,
the word the thing,
the thing no thing,
baby, this morning’s childhood
will take you through
the generations, your daydream
at 40, when you feel a leaf
tickle the insides of your chest,
and the little bird
on the sill begins to tell you
of the time you heard your mother’s
words on the air floating at one
with sky, earth, heartbeat, self.
 

Shivani Sivagurunathan is a Malaysian author. Her first novel, Yalpanam, was published by Penguin Southeast Asia in September 2021. 
Her poetry collection, Being Born (Maya Press) and her book of fiction, What Has Happened to Harry Pillai?: Two Novellas (Clarity Publishing) came out in 2022.

After Tea

My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, 
and I intend to end up there. - Rumi


After our tea is cool enough to drink
but not before it is gone
we discuss my problem:
My words, they are like snakes
that are hard to pin down.
My ideas slide away from people’s
ears when I try to get them in.
In short: no one is having a good time.

Later, in my bed,
I feel the situation inside me
like chickens loud in a barn.
I see myself now as you described:
a mostly tolerable clown.
The hair on my neck stands up.
I am tempted to believe you.
I am tempted to take your eyes into my eyes
And just agree this time.
I am tempted to let the feeling live:
let the isolation eat me,
this tight throated sensation that I am 
trapped in a long hallway with no doors.

Somewhere inside my body
a friend opens the first thing she can find.
She lets me into the cool, dark place with the stars.
I try to find the border in here
where the universe is expanding all the time.

What if I am right, I say to the dark.
What if there is very little difference between anyone?
What if I am just one shape in an 8 billion piece puzzle?
So what if it takes thousands
and thousands of years to find where I belong?
I am still whole.
I am still in the river that runs.

What if I am right, I want to say to you
What if it is beautiful to feel the same as everyone?
To not just notice difference all the time?
What if, on this occasion,
my inner eyes are not blind?

The tea, however, has already been drunk 
and you are gone. In your own home,
I am not a thought in your mind.
You don’t know that I will talk to you all night
or that I have been speaking to the cosmic you
since we met the first time.
I shake in your direction.
A rosebush quivers 
when the wind comes by.

Can you hear me?
I’m not giving up on my own body.
We are not giving up on our own minds.

Liz Bruno is a public servant in Oregon. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, ISLE, The Coachella Review, the Cape Rock, Euphony Journal, Roast Magazine, Montana Magazine, and more.

Hineini

Imagine what it is to be a native plant,
to grow in soil that surrounds like skin,
skin that stretches to fit the rooting, 
rooting that touches gold and humus, nourished by that rich sponge.

And there is also a plant that is impossible, 
it envies tumbleweed that once had roots 
epiphytes are miracles that feed on clouds,
this plant moves from pot to pot by strange hands,
blooms on the shortest day of the year,
drops leaves overnight. 

Was there a place in God’s garden
for this stranger and exile
who seeks her home through fire 
in that burning bush where nothing else was required?

note: הִנֵּנִיis “Hineini” in Hebrew for “Here I am,” and it expresses a total surrender and willingness to serve.  It was said by Abraham, Moses, and other prophets when called by God.

Vivien Drabkin‘s poetry and fiction have been published in Ekstasis, Washington Square Review, and Guernica–A Magazine of Global Arts and Politics. Her poems seek to explore the sacred through an earthly or quotidian lens with a gaze on objects such as a garden, family home, or baseball. She is inspired by poets such as Elizabeth Bishop and Anne Sexton while also drawing on the beauty of God’s language from Scripture. She currently lives in Austin, Texas, where she teaches high school.

After the Electricity Stops                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Clad in black plastic with gold-
tone accents, you, my late mid-
century AM-FM radio, have three
capsule-size sliding buttons
and two round knobs on top,
as well as a loose coiled wire
for your antenna. I love you, 
AM-FM radio, for your modest
size, like a Kleenex box, your easy
volume control, and how I can move
a red bar in a slender window
from low numbers to high.
I’ve set you, AM-FM radio,
on a dresser in a small bedroom
and keep you tuned to classical 
music. Your tone is really quite 
decent, like when I sing in the shower.

My little AM-FM radio, I turn 
you on and off by your vintage 
two-prong plug. When I pull
it from the outlet, you have the curious 
idiosyncrasy of a moment’s delay 
before the electricity stops, i.e.
a fraction of a second in which 
the music still plays … 

I wonder, AM-FM radio: is this 
how dying will be? In eternity, 
how long is a fraction of a second? 
Will we continue to hear music? 

Dear AM-FM radio, this is what I know
for certain: I saw my Grandma Thomassian
in the middle of the night a few days 
after she died. She was in her wool
outfit of rose herringbone, the one
she always wore for something special.

Andrea E. Johnson is retired from a long career in public health. She participates now in several writers groups, both poetry and memoir. Her love of the natural world, music, cultural heritage and history makes its way onto the page. She lives on the edge of the Twin Cities in Lake Elmo, Minnesota.

Seed Pods
		In memory of my brother

As I walk the seawall—
now a desert of barnacles—
seed pods collect in the tidal pool
and last year’s leaves lodge
in the rocks below.

My thoughts turn to leaping
we did as children—
	you on the pilings of some wharf,
	me on the high tide of bedrock.

The tide consumes the leftovers
of mussel beds, the sea gulping 
between the rocks, and I remember
what you said to me that day—

High tide, waves lapping across
the jetty’s end and my feet as I reached
for your hand across the bay 
and jumped.

Ellen Jane Powers lives on the North Shore of Boston. Her life and career have taken many twists and turns, and now she’s happily retired from corporate life. She spent 12 years on the editorial review board of a small literary journal from Maine. Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals over the years. She has a collection of poetry, Celestial Navigation (Cherry Grove) and a chapbook, Toward the Beloved (Finishing Line).