Askesis in the Wild
Luke 1
At first, it seemed the Seraph’s punishment:
tongue turned to silt, to sand, to drought-dry bed,
once living words etched in a fossil stream,
seeming extinction in this wilderness
where winds licked joints of bone with neither whine
nor throaty groan.
The incense turned to ash.
But wallowing in ash he had a dream
of green shoots in cracked dirt, reminding sign
this silence nourished voice, that it was sent
to teach him not to question but to bless,
askesis through long desert months, then flash
and flooding flow:
“His name is John,” he said.
Steven Knepper teaches in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies at Virginia Military Institute. His poems have appeared in The Alabama Literary Review, The William and Mary Review, First Things, Presence, Pembroke Magazine, Seminary Ridge Review, SLANT, The American Journal of Poetry, and other journals.
Amethyst Review 