Monthly Archives: June 2018

Every day I try to sit for a spell, to begin to create. Sometimes I’m successful, sometimes I’m not. I never know the difference. I try to transcend the ordinary in a way that sings, that comes alive, that speaks to me in ways I can’t always describe. In that sense, writing for me is as mystical an experience as prayer. Perhaps you feel the same.

I’d like to think I’m being led by the Spirit to work on myself, to discover more about what lies within. Unlike therapy or counseling, I’m not looking for a “cure” or a diagnosis. Or publication. For me it like early morning exercise on a good day — a way to feel better about myself, and the world.

It’s mystical, of course. As I sit to create I am almost completely unaware of what I’m about to say, and that perhaps is the biggest blessing I receive in creating poetry and in encountering the sacred. My soul is led on mindful paths that I would never have imagined when I first sat down – the lid of a peanut butter jar; a blue jay rising and falling from a porch railing to the deck; an exchange between two lovers in a Christopher Isherwood novel.

Where am I going to be led today? Free to sing in the shape of a sonnet. In the rules of grammar. In the play of assonance.

Here’s my center: I’m doing something that I love to do. Just like prayer, like mediation, like worship. With all the consolations and desolations, I feel called to move forward.

And isn’t that how the mystical beckons us? A chance to savor our intuition of the divine, in this quiet moment? A cup of coffee, a blank notepad, a favorite pen, a laptop… all elements which look so solitary, but actually open us all to the mystery of life that surrounds each one of us.

And isn’t that enough, as we, preparing for our unknown last breath, can feel once again the joy of a moment well lived?

Chuck Thompson has an MA in English from the University of Massachusetts, and his published work includes Busy and Blessed: 10 Simple Steps for Parents Seeking Peace (Christian Insight Press, 2014). He’s also a secondary school chaplain and spiritual director in Chicago, Illinois.

*

This is another in a series of short reflections on writing and spirituality. Please consider submitting one of your own – the editor would be pleased to read it with a view to publication in Amethyst Review.

Four Hundred Roses

From books I learned the Great Mother still
lives, disguised, yet as much with us as carbon.
I’m curious. Franciscan Sisters dispatch
an invitation wrapped in newspaper, to honor
Her in the form of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Inside the chapel modernist and vertical wood
seems institutional. I perch behind women
garbed in black and white discipline
serenely contemplating Her portrait.
Her heavy blue veil electrified by aurora.

Four hundred roses in plastic buckets
sing forward to the altar. First encounter
with the rosary. Repetitious praying alternate
English and Spanish and kneeling in a short pew,
wood pressing my knee sharply. The rose scent
alters vision, becomes haze. English speaking
tongue, thickly wrong-shaped for Spanish speed.

But speaks. Among a chorus. Brown face.
Layers shed. Until beneath hums. The majestic
SHE. Pulsing. And my cells too. With HER.
Creation spark. And refuge. Not safety.
And yes, horrors befall us. And yes, sanctuary
hoped, sought. No breath continued a guarantee.
But peace in trial. Tranquility in extreme moment.
And answered yes. The night mangled leafless.

Peggy Turnbull studied anthropology in college and has a master’s in library and information science.  She has written all her life, mostly in diaries, but after returning to her birthplace in Wisconsin, she began to write poems.  Read them in Ariel Chart, Writers Resist, and Verse-Virtual or visit https://peggyturnbull.blogspot.com/  .

Mato Tipila  

(“Bear Lodge” in Lakota)

last night trickling intricate filaments
of light-centred clusters
orbited Taurus’s shoulder
in a fluid milky-ultraviolet smouldering

like scattering starlight
seven neon-mercurial sisters
dance with four-hundred
luminous boys holding seven ears
of green corn from seven tilled fields
embodying seven tribes

tumbling sequential celestial bodies
unravel a pointing finger of fate
impossible to ignore
at the umbilicus of the universe

at the dwelling of thirteen serpents
seven bears hunt
the ethereal sisters
playing in a sunlit glade

seeking refuge under sacred rock
seven sisters sit on praying knees
veined clawed cracks spreading
from seven scratching bears
vigorously carving vertical
erupting rock formations
Coyote’s daughters take flight
ascend the sky tree
their lustrous light firing
up the white river aligning with Orion’s belt
where the Pleiades tribal spirits
dance on the leg of the Bull

Ruby McCann is a creative practitioner who holds degrees from Trinity Washington and University of Glasgow.  She has published work in publications, You Don’t Look British, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gaelstrom-1 Magazine, Invisible Cities, Poetry Scotland, Journeys, Word Rhythms, and many others.  She lives in Glasgow, Scotland next to the River Clyde.  Nature and walking inspires her writing.

To a god I don’t believe in

I look for prayers
in the crack of a peepal leaf,
in your trembling sur.

I look for blessings
in thunderstorms slithering down
with mallippu blossoms in palms.

I stare at my atheism
in a darpan filled with you;
your questions dripping on me.

I find your fragrance
when I light the deepam everyday
at my mother’s behest;

I scratch at my doubts
day and night, looking for
your respite in every kovil.

[Glossary – peepal (Hindi): oak tree; sur (Hindi): rhythm/notes; mallippu (Tamil): jasmine; darpan (Hindi/Sanskrit): mirror; deepam (Sanskrit/Tamil): lamp (usually lit for worship); kovil (Tamil): temple]

 Anjali Bhavan is a 19-year-old engineering undergrad. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in Speaking Tree (a weekend supplement of The Times of India), Esthesia Magazine, Coldnoon International Journal, Allegro Poetry Review, Sooth Swarm Journal, The Hindu and Cafe Dissensus Everyday. She currently writes on her blog, for The Wordsmiths and for High on Films.

111 Trees for Every Girl-Child

(An Ode to Kiran)*

a young girl’s life
……………………………….Kiran
transforms death
……………………………….Kiran
through rebirth
……………………………….Kiran

her divine manifestation
lingers
lives……in an oasis of neem
sheesham……mango……amla
from seedling

holds dear…..birthing
baby girls……budding like saplings
blossoming reforestation
into womanhood

growing girls……yielding
trees from shooting seeds
nurtured side by side…..girl-trees
flourishing in unity

ensuring their survival
villagers collectively
care conscientiously
cultivate joy in protecting
lulled sleeping lassies
planting Aloe Vera
around tree trunks

creations daughters
bloom from branches
flowering green with leaves

*In the village of Piplantri in Rajasthan, India, villagers celebrate new-born girls by planting 111 trees. This marvellous custom was started by former village leader, Shyam Sundar to honour the memory of his daughter, Kiran who passed away when young.

Ruby McCann is a creative practitioner who holds degrees from Trinity Washington and University of Glasgow.  She has published work in publications, You Don’t Look British, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gaelstrom-1 Magazine, Invisible Cities, Poetry Scotland, Journeys, Word Rhythms, and many others.  She lives in Glasgow, Scotland next to the River Clyde.  Nature and walking inspires her writing.

A Ghazal of Love and Purity inspired by
حافظ شیرازی

With Great Blessings from the Imam
The Poet Seer feels the Wings of Protection

With a noble Heart & strong Mind
The Poet Seer struggles to apprehend the Truth

With a bowl of Muscat grapes & sweet stringed Lyre
The Poet Seer sings Ghazal to purify his Soul.

With words and music to express his devotion
The Poet Seer charms all who listen

With the kindliness of strangers and Holy men
The Poet Seer is helped along the dark Path

With a low Sun in a high Sky
The Poet Seer walks toward his Knowing

With only a thin Kellim & the Koran for warmth
The Poet Seer sleeps well under the curve of a starry sky

With Love, Truth and Beauty in his Heart
The Poet Seer seeks to achieve his completeness.

Carolyn Patricia Richardson is a poet, painter with work in the Public Catalogue, now re-branded as ArtUK; a maker of filmed poems and a guerrilla poet in the wilds of Dumfries & Galloway. Carolyn was a Director of the Scottish Writers Centre and is working for the 2017 Cumbrian literary festival  “Borderlines”. Carolyn’s  filmpoem “Spring Train” was commended in Cumbria’s FilmFling in 2017 and her recent publication is “Scots’ Rock”, Red Squirrel Press, 2016. www.redsquirrelpress.com Carolyn is lucky enough to spend some of the year abroad writing and painting in the South of France in National Booktown of Montolieu.

www.my-france.me   www.montolieu-livre.fr

Après                                                

you hope it
will become
a cathedral
not a last
aerodome
…..vast
empty space
once filled
with solid light
now propped
hurriedly
with prayer
and Study
and more poems
than you ever wrote
before is that
enough
to hold the ceiling
up
will this cavernous
leftover air
be past tense
of flight
gape roofed
and spider glassed
or
rather
reims
(look)
sens-
auxerre
(look up,
…dear one)
sacré

coeur

Since feeling comes first …

– e.e. cummings

…………..… why bother with thought?
Ask any riled wave or wind-swept gull.
They do what they do without studying
tidal charts or Bernoulli’s principle.

Electric bees in wildflower fields
or mother seals prodding pups to shore?
No conferencing with expert botanists
or sophists on the art of parenting.

Who surrenders to Love at first thought?
Even at first sight is not exact. Try
pondering: Love, like Life and Death and all                                  
the in-betweens, feels before it sees or thinks.

Carolyn Martin is blissfully retired in Clackamas, OR, where she gardens, writes, and plays with creative friends. Her poems appear in publications throughout North America and the UK and her fourth poetry collection, A Penchant for Masquerades, will be released by Unsolicited Press in 2019. She serves as poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly.

Mary of the Rotten Heart

O Mary of the Lake
Goddess of the Empty Cathedral
the cathedral with roof of sky-cerulean
roof of sky-black pinpricked by far-off leaking light
the cathedral which molders
only opens for funerals and midnight masses
presided over by your acolytes
Father Turkey Vulture, choir-boy bats
how they sing so sweet and soft so only you can hear

O Mary of the Cemetery
Patron Saint of Curses and Hauntings
mother of little-boy ghosts and little girl-beasts
babes you buried centuries ago
now they roam the pioneers’ graveyard
with pennies where their eyes once were
with green-black snakes as playmates
how they blink the penny eyes in their snake-belly white faces
how they scare the tourists

O Mary of the Rotten Heart
Patron Saint of Coffee Grounds and Mouth Sores
mother who rose from the dunes
sand-burned and wreathed in algae
you bearer of bad news
harbinger of doom
bitch who cursed me to forever want what used to be
I want I want them back but O
old friends are dead to me
or dead in the red red dirt
once-lovers turned to foes
and how the landscape shifts with every northern wind

O Mary how you maim me
this peninsula is cold and full of stars
I drive into the dusty rotten heart of it
in search of talismans
in search of the leaking song of used-to-be
I hear whispers in the radio static
see faces in the fog so green
my third eye is a lighthouse
no match for you and the sea-change of your moods
how you offer me the sun then leave me with the bitter beer-dark lake

O Mary of the Porte des Mortes
Goddess of Shipwrecks and Rogue Waves
cohort to the underwater panther
you drown the sailors with your claws bared
crack the ships between your teeth
Nambi-Za spits their snake-belly souls up as offering
you festoon yourself with necklaces of tarnished cutlery
O Mary
O Death how you forget
though they played at piracy my friends were never sailors

O Mary I remember that day when the ship came
and there you were in your robes of cerulean
your halo burning black as night
O Mary I said don’t you weep for me
O mama I said
don’t leave me mama
take me with you mama
keep me safe in heaven
dead with all my friends
don’t leave me
and I fell to my knees and I clutched at your robes and O
you turned into a seagull
a flash of wing and squawk in the dying light
and I felt this lump in my throat like a penny like a stone
I coughed it into my mouth onto my tongue
how sweet it was how bitter like beer like coffee grounds like ghosts
I spit it into my palm and it was warm and wet
it was my heart
it was a lakefull of algae and rusty knives and rotten fish
O Mary how I laid it down by the shoreline
how I spelled it out in pebbles on the sunset beach
this my obituary
my epitaph
my psalm my spell my poem

Jessie Lynn McMains is a poet, writer, and small press owner. Her words have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Memoir Mixtapes, Dirty Paws Poetry Review, Left of the Lake Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. She collects souvenir pennies and stick & poke tattoos, and is perpetually nostalgic, melancholy, and restless. You can find her website at recklesschants.net, or find her on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram @rustbeltjessie

To Each Her Saint

Canonize? The prize
for two miracles.
Not much to ask,
considering.
Someone walks upright,
banishes unruly cells,
faces off
the voices in her head,
stops a river’s rise:
triumphs claimed
in an almost-saint’s name.

For those of us
who dismiss titles
and candles lit
on flowered altars
in a namesake church,
we elect
to venerate a dad
stacking barrels
of paint for years
on the merciless concrete
of a factory floor.

Carolyn Martin is blissfully retired in Clackamas, OR, where she gardens, writes, and plays with creative friends. Her poems appear in publications throughout North America and the UK and her fourth poetry collection, A Penchant for Masquerades, will be released by Unsolicited Press in 2019. She serves as poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly.