Amethyst Review

In This Place

God was in this place and I did not know it.
What I felt did not matter
what I said, I said to no one
and anyway, it was nonsense
and anyway, it was a whisper
and anyway, I didn’t mean it.

God was a name I heard once
in a story someone told me.
A story when I was so young that 
everything around me was huge
and I was small.
Was God small like me? Or big like them?
I didn’t know.
I wasn’t sure.

I asked questions:
Is God beautiful?
Does God sleep?
Where does God go when I sleep? 
And what about food?
And does God wear clothes?
And what about tooth brushing—does God have to do that?  

Now I am older.
Now I am old. My knees make 
cracking noises and sound
like they’re breaking apart
but it’s just me, walking around.

Is God hearing this?

Who said this was okay?

Last night, in a dream
I looked for you.
I thought you would know if God was still around—
how to see  
him? it? her?
What to call, how to name.
I thought you had wisdom.
I thought you were smart.

When we were young you loved to talk.
We talked about whatever our brains landed on,
one stone to the next—
light-footed, sure, easy.
You never tired.
We were twenty-two.
Nothing seemed true
until we could discuss it together.

Did we talk about God?

Your blue eyes made sparks— 
what was that?

Or did your eyes open wider than anyone else’s?
Or did your eyes warm the room?
Or did I fall into them?

Your eyes are beautiful.
God is supposed to be beautiful.
Your eyes were beautiful.

When I pray now, I struggle to name God.
Beautiful One, Divine One, 
One-ness, Wholeness,
Hey You Out There.  

Is God in me, my home, my mezuzah on the doorframe?
If I kiss the mezuzah before I walk inside, will God see me?
If I pray, if I say the words
is God in my mouth? In my breath when I exhale?
I wonder if God saw you.

Did God see you 
trying as hard as you could 
to live?
As chemicals were pumped into your body
as your hair fell out
as you were held
as you breathed
as you moved from one place to the next?

I see you on the inside of my eyelids,
in my dreams.
See you in old, curling photographs,
in the red notebook I always carried with me,
in faded ink on paper.

I guess God is here now.
I guess I want that.
I want to glimpse the truth 
and un-truth of it all, the way you saw it.
The way your blue eyes sparked—
held the whole world and its promises.

Amy Steingart’s poetry collection Her Belly Made of Wings was published in 2025, and her first collection I Am Where You Have Put Your Eggs was published in 2019, both from Small White Cat Press. She is a co-founder, editor, and contributor to “Writers’ Bloc” and is published in Lame Duck, Kind Writers, Poetica, Pandemic and RitualWell among others. Amy writes her own versions of standard Jewish prayers reflecting today’s challenging world. She is inspired to write by listening to John Coltrane, harvesting dreams, and practicing Judaism. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Readiness 
 
Be ready every moment, but don’t make
a fetish of it. Readiness is all
about us, placed there, ready, for our sake,
to set a good example. There’s the fall
of apples, here’s the ripening of grain,
of grapes, of olives for the oil press,
the readiness of burrs, a hunter’s bane,
to cling, the instant grasp of holiness.
As readiness itself is sacred, show
some care embracing it. You may not feel
much in return. Perhaps a modest glow.
Or burn. The turning of an inner wheel.
It’s hard to say. You may feel nothing. Still,
though few face calmly their surprise, you will.

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.

Jesus Said Shut Up
(Mark 1:25)

I knelt before Him, scattering my prayer
About, some here, some there,
Petition rabid, praise a bit abrupt;
In vague despair
Suggested I was vicious and corrupt,
Till Jesus said, “Shut up!”

And as my words fell listless to the floor
A safety heretofore
Protecting me had now been overthrown.
No words, no metaphors
Could save me now. He’d called me to His Throne
To face Him all alone.

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.

Willow

Out walking one autumn blue sky day,
I stopped at a willow tree, 
bell of breathing light. 

The long wands moved in the wind
and the leaves sifted light and shade. 
Bright and dark, enthreaded, 
fell like sunlit rain,
like twill across my loom,
warp of joy, weft of pain— 
beauty in full sight 
and yet, as if bereft, I craved it.

North, the tree was dull, 
dishevelled like a nest of bramble. 
South, it swayed and drifted, 
spilling light—a fountain in the wind. 
It wove, 
wove and unwove 
its fall of shimmering quills.

Parting the weave, I entered 
and drew around me quilted light—  
angelic substance visible in our domain,
not kept or lost. 
A blueish sun collected in the skein, 
the sky rained down
and all was still.
Deep and deeper in I went, 
stood worldless in the billowing light.

Jane Galin writes poetry and essays. Her work has appeared in Spiritus, Image Journal, JAMA, As You Were, Northampton Poetry Review, Thrive; An Anthology, and elsewhere.
She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Family Business? My question for Aebbe

‘a mother of the handmaidens of Christ, called Aebbe, who ruled over the monastery situated in a place called Coldingham, a woman honoured among all as well for her piety as for her noble birth, for she was [the] sister of King Oswiu.’ Bede, Life of St Cuthbert

When did you realise – if ever - that each gifted remote spot
the Nook, old fort on river Derwent, and last Urbs Coludi
all three, even Oswald's, were lookout stations, outposts
of a military regime? Was it like sun burst into a cloudy day,

or slow trickle of light through shimmering trees,
or an ever-shaded place where the sun took fright,
not permitted to shine? Filled with plants, mosses
growth of various kinds, but without clear light.

Did gentle rain come after? The kind that cleanses,
softens the ground for growth.
Or was there a waterfall, as on the Derwent Water
noisy, driving out all other reflection?

Or was the sun proud in the sky, everlasting shafts
of light. No rain clouds. Just basking.   

 

Endnote: Aebbe’s brothers were Northumbrian Kings Oswald, Oswiu and Oswine, who made her gifts of land to found religious communities. 

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.

Epiphany

We knelt; and that’s the part that always gets told
or gets painted, or the painting’s lines are read
for comment on the metaphor - and while each
figure figures for something before, like Greek
from Phoenician - no one thinks of who we were,
we three, and what it took for us to return.

And who doesn’t like to anoint and give gold;
who’d not give his most stunning cabochon and
bring forth the holy censer to swing those scents
swirling eternal ward, click….ca-click, ca-click;
while holding carefully his sleeve of gold silk
or carefully woven Kente or purple
dyed in the wool; while all of the lesser folk
look on in awe of us three looking on, awed
by this changeling who has now resolved the Way.

That’s the easy part; point of metaphor,
gist of the story. Or, the vanishing point?
As Magus, I would want you to know at which
Caravansary we three broke fast and asked
if our Court Seers meant to keep from us something
they knew would bring danger, could well lose us our
lives, our lands? Or worse, our Eunuchs conspiring
with snarky subalterns to denigrate, to
execute us as heathen emissaries?

How will it fare, for us each, when we arrive?
Him with his piles, the other, his cough, and me?
Still, we three repack and say nary a word
about the star which now seems to have vanished. 
How long since we sat, safe and strong on our throne?
I worry about what I know I must tell.

Gerard Furey taught high school English courses for forty years. He lived through grade school Atom bomb drills, high school expulsion, steel mill labor, learning his Draft numbers on TV, and thankfully having children and grandchildren. Having survived the 60’s he will aver that, yes, History does repeat itself.

Mourning Doves Dozing


I have netted
the blue-lidded doves
that flew
and will fly again
from the green-lattice
limbs
of the cypress.

We do well to contain
them a minute
so solemn are they
and prayerful.

When I say netted,
I mean arrested
by eye and
by sheer eye
guided inward
toward languor

whereas, otherwise,
they would nod there,
soft warm feet
redding the bough
and leave
beyond notice.

Lisa Graley teaches English and humanities classes at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, devoting special attention to courses on Plagues and Poxes, Medicine and Disease, and Scriptures as Literature. She has published one volume of poetry (Box of Blue Horses, Gival, 2013) and one volume of stories (The Current that Carries, Univ. of Georgia Press, 2016).

My Anthill Teacher 

I was on a retreat in my late twenties. During a break in the schedule I walked into the woods adjoining the retreat center, carrying a little backpack holding a bottle of water, some fruit, and a book on the Psalms.

I found an open space, grabbed my book and water and sat on my pack. Easily distractable I soon turned my attention to the impressive number of black ants scurrying across the sandy soil. 

I tried to detect their direction. Where was their nest? I moved forward on my knees to follow a few and spotted one with a bit of leaf in her mouth. A-ha! She must be going back to the nest. I got to my feet. Bent over I followed her, but she wasn’t a straight-line traveler. I staggered above her until she got into some grass, then bushes and gone.

New strategy. Standing, still bent over, I walked in a circle looking for little sandy piles. I widened the diameter of my search zone several times but nada. 

Time to return to the retreat center so I went back to get my discarded book and the rest of my stuff. As I reached for my book I saw, a foot behind my seat, the largest anthill I had ever seen. It was up to my knees with multiple entrances. It looked like an Anasazi cliff dwelling.  

I laughed at my poor observation skills. I hadn’t yet been diagnosed with ADHD, but I knew myself well enough not to be shocked. 

I thought this experience might be significant, not that anything had been arranged for my benefit but because on retreat we have the time and intentionality to reflect on the lessons of nature. Emerson wrote in Nature, “what is a farm but a mute gospel?” If true for a farm, surely true for the natural world and animal kingdom.

The significance escaped me as had the ant nest. Oh well, I figured, perhaps more will be revealed.

Many years later, I heard a reference to Jacob’s ladder, the dream imagery in Genesis 28:10-17, so I picked up my Bible to check it out. 

You may know the backstory. 

Jacob has tricked his blind father, Isaac, into giving him the birthright blessing that should have gone to older brother, Esau. Their mother, Rebekah, and Isaac tell Jacob to flee Esau’s wrath and travel to Rebekah’s clan to find a Hebrew wife.

At the end of his first day in flight Jacob sleeps and dreams of a ladder extending from earth to heaven. Angels descend and ascend the ladder above which stands the Lord who reassures Jacob with the extravagant promises made to his grandfather, Abraham – countless descendants, ownership of the land, greatness of his people throughout the world. 

Jacob awakes and says, Surely, the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.

In this place. This phrase landed for me, not merely because of my anthill experience. 

Since childhood I had actively searched for contact with the divine. I was a devout altar boy. I won the theology award at my Catholic high school. More intensive theology courses at university where I also took high doses of the psychedelic drugs that promised transcendent experience. 

I chanted with the Krishnas in San Francisco, danced with the Sufis in New York, hiked over a mountain to drop in at 3 a.m. to a monastery in Vermont. And I feared I had failed because I didn’t become a monk and never made it to India. 

What was I missing and why couldn’t I find it?

I became a sociology professor so I could help students question the received knowledge of their society and culture. My education as a social scientist trained me to be skeptical, to review research primarily to find the problems in method and conclusions. This fed my inclination toward apophatic theology, the “negative way” to God by rejecting what cannot be true. Like many ex-Catholics, I shed iconography, sacraments, and theological certainty. I taught myself to question any experience I might for a moment consider sacred. 

I started attending Quaker meetings because of simplicity and the history of peace and social justice activism. I figured they’d be a good place to find deeply committed comrades, not a place for making any deep connection with Spirit. 

Then, at a silent retreat I found John Yungblut’s Discovering God Within, one of the many spiritual pamphlets produced by a Quaker retreat center. Well, yes, the inward light, of course. I had heard about that. 

But as I read further, I started to experience one of those moments of apparently deep connection. Could the simple Quaker way possibly be as profound as Tibetan or Zen Buddhism? Could I really experience the divine without chanting and intensive training in yoga and meditation? 

The Lord is in this place. 

I am now in my seventies, and I’ve come to believe that what I sought so intensively as a younger man has been with me all the time. Well, beside me and within me. 

I had experienced the inward light of conscience and companionship, internal and with others, and found it insufficiently dramatic. 

I understand now that some love affairs are gentle and abiding; some are passionately euphoric and painful as described by some mystics.

I no longer feel I must see through the glass clearly before I die. Why did I think I had to? Why did I think I could? 

Ursula Leguin gave me spiritual direction decades ago when I read The Lathe of Heaven:

Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.

I think I was nearly destroyed on that lathe. I would have suffered more if I hadn’t met my wife and discovered the gifts of the spirit that come with the challenges and blessings of a committed marriage and family. 

My family and life within a challenging and supportive Quaker community have taught me I don’t need to learn or know anything other than the lessons of patience, forgiveness, and love.

James Hannon is a psychotherapist in Massachusetts where he accompanies adolescents and adults recovering from addictions, disappointments and deceptions. His work has appeared in Blue Lake Review, Cold Mountain Review, Heimat Review, Pensive, Psaltery and Lyre, and other journals and in Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets. He writes about politics and culture on his substack, Joyful Resistance (jimhannon.substack.com).

In the cathedral, on the morning when I learned of Mary Oliver’s death
	Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Los Angeles, California.


alabaster
light spills 
slant sugar 

pipe organ
hums 
deepest cherry

and my bones 
are jealous to inhabit 
the sweetest part – 

I am hungry to be overwhelmed with being – 

to press my spine to this cold tile
let my eyelids flutter 
soft shadow
in smooth pool of pearl

and be mingled with rumble – 

and didn’t she say at last, and too soon?

and how splendid 
after a lifetime of wondering
for her to know hush of pebble 
dwell in throat of lily – 

I will dig these heels into moment		
clamor cloud-full grateful

(of course it is raining)

Bryn Cavin is a current MFA student at Pacific University. She holds a B.A. (Hons.) in Literature & Writing from Whitworth University and has held writing positions with such organizations as Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, Tahirih Justice Center, Museum of Glass, and the Smithsonian. Bryn is a former Assistant Managing Editor of Rock & Sling Literary Journal. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her boxer-pittie mix, Dalloway.