Author Archives: Sarah

A Cup of Grace

Imagine a cup of grace
poured into your palm,
which is also cupped.
What will you do with this
unwarranted bounty?

Rub it over your face,
a holy moisturizer?
Drink it, in desperate gulps or
measured sips? Shape it
into a ball of cloud,
then hand it over
to the old woman, the sick
child, the lost man?

Convert yourself
into an instrument of grace.
A piccolo perhaps, viola or timpani,
like a heart beat, an unforsaken
heart beat.

Imagine a symphony as you pray,
consider the notes you would play.
Then go in grace.
Uncup your hand.

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Kathleen Brewin Lewis writes about the natural world and family life. She’s the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Fluent in Rivers and July’s Thick Kingdom. Her work has also appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Christian Century, Southern Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology Vol. V: Georgia. She’s a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net nominee.

Tahira

Allah said
“If we allow her
this pain, she will
only make poetry
out of it” and one
angel after another
answered “So?”
“Now do you see
why I created them?”
spoke the Beneficent,
the Merciful.

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Wayne-Daniel Berard, PhD, teaches Humanities at Nichols College, Dudley, MA. He publishes broadly in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. His novella, Everything We Want, was published in 2018 by Bloodstone Press. A poetry collection, The Realm of Blessing, will be published in 2020 by Unsolicited Press.

Butterfly years

He said “How many years did you stay on earth?” – 23:112

A butterfly waits an entire afternoon
for another pair of wings to fly with
that’s like waiting two human years
stone still, pheromones firing
for a chance to dance

These years seem wasted
until you see
them dart and hang in symmetry
light travelling through one
ensnared by the other
like two church windows tripping
trapping enough light to stop time
until butterfly years become
a dance with eternity

They said: “We stayed a day or part of a day, ask those who account.” – 21:113

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Taher Adel is a British-Bahraini poet and spoken word artist. He is currently completing his MA in Creative Writing and Poetry at the University of East Anglia. His poetry has also been published in Ambit, SMOKE Magazine, The New European and Poetry Salzburg Review.

New View of Neptune

Here in this azure outpost
Of the once-known universe,
There will be no more crying or pain.
I wiped away my final tear
When I came down
This Neptune morning.

It is so BLUE!
Blue like the skies of midsummer,
Like the way the oceans
Should have looked on Earth.
I race like a strong, cleansing wind across the surface
Of this wondrous sphere.

Moons there are a-plenty
A multitude of beings
Could ill-meet by moonlight.

The sun is a distant dot
An inflamed sore on the face of the deep.
All is serene and languid here.
The Earth, my tragic dream, has passed.
I wish I could say good riddance…

But I am the Spirit
And now I hover
Over life-giving waters.

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Jill Buckley is a member of the Stirling – based Cowane Street Writers, a group of writers in central Scotland with a broadly Christian focus. She is also a secondary school English teacher. The above poem, which imagines a divine creator with a new project on another planet, is both theologically unsound and scientifically impossible – purely speculative!

A Plea

Star-maker, master of luster,
I oppose the unprincipled
Of which this world is so peopled,
Some wicked folk prone to fester.

If deterred, they bite and pester,
The righteous first mute, then frightened,
Star-maker, master of luster.

Villains may blubber or bluster,
Unashamed, even emboldened.
Here virtue devolves, diminished.
Let discernment never be finished,
Star-maker, master of luster.

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Dennis Daly has published seven books of poetry and poetic translations. He writes reviews regularly for The Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene and on occasion for the Notre Dame Review, Ibbetson Street, Wilderness House, and the Somerville Times. He occasionally reads his poetry at various venues. Please see his blog at dennisfdaly.blogspot.com.

In the time of lockdown

Each morning she kneels on the pavement
beside the cathedral’s locked gate.
Her floral skirt is bright against the concrete.

Sunbirds glint in jacaranda trees. The air
is winter-sharp. There are no passers-by
to observe the thin slant of her shadow,

her grace in solitude, hands clasped,
head bowed, her face hidden
by the floppy contours of her hat.

On the other side of the gate Christ, nailed
to a cross, awaits death and resurrection.
The light is unforgiving. It exposes

cracks in paving stones, hardens
the edges of things, etches
beneath Christ’s wreath of thorns, His pain.

Each morning she is there on the pavement
and Christ is there on His cross.
The gate between them, locked.

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Marian Christie was born in Zimbabwe and has lived in Africa, Europe and the Middle East before settling in her current home in southeast England. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals, including Allegro Poetry,Amethyst Review, The Beach Hut, Black Bough Poetry and The Ekphrastic Review, and in the anthologies The Stony Thursday Book 2018 and The Bridges 2020 Poetry Anthology.

When not writing or reading poetry, she looks at the stars, puzzles over the laws of physics, listens to birdsong and crochets gifts for her grandchildren. She blogs at www.marianchristiepoetry.net and can be found on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marian_v_o.

Wilderness

Bone white, dead land,
Under the dark corona’d sun,
Where horn-tailed scorpions sand-swim
Between his feet.
The clamouring wind scowls around his head,
Then to a high table he (by his father we say)
Is led into temptation.
There the world laid out before him
Chess-board flat,
Here kings and queens genuflect
Unsteadily from beneath their gowns
But such pieces are neither
Black or white, and in this game
The squares are merely windowless cells
Where doubt squats in the corner.

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Bernard Pearson’s work  appears in many publications, including; Aesthetica Magazine , The Edinburgh Review, Crossways, Patchwork, FourxFour, The Gentian  In 2017 a selection of his poetry ‘In Free Fall’ was published by Leaf by Leaf  Press. In 2019  he won second prize in The Aurora Prize for Writing for his poem Manor Farm

The sleepy sadness of things ending

Will it be a relief to evaporate
and become everything else?
to stop twisting in the dark sheets of night
wings frozen to my sides, the moon
a lemon rind filling my mouth
with the sleepy sadness of things ending

Does the river think: I will let go
my song and one day leave
the bright trout who fan my heart—
rise, give up rivering and become
instead the hard sparks of stars

What struggle to shake the clay
from the new liturgy of our being:
……..the flight path of a hawk moth
……..winter trees cracking like gunshots—
you and I not even adding up
to a single violet, a secret
keeping itself, the business of eons
wishing to be nothing else

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Watched by crows and friend to salamanders, Lisa Creech Bledsoe is a writer living in the mountains of North Carolina. She has two books, “Appalachian Ground” (2019) and “Wolf Laundry” (2020) out, and new poems in American Writers Review, The Main Street Rag, and Jam & Sand, among others.

The Cosmos in My Coffee

I cradle my coffee cup in the nest of my hands
and stare at spiraling drops of curdling cream
like tiny galaxies of stars that demand
their own universe, or so it seems.
Or so it seems, but only to the mind that’s me.
No one else spies the cosmos in my daily rituals.
In fact, most people look, but never see.
Like the difference between religious, and spiritual.
I don’t mean to say I’m more evolved or smart.
The reverse is true: if anything, I’m dense.
In the race for money, career, or fame, I’m a slow start.
The virtue of staring out a window – my only defense.
But when tiny flames of words flicker on my tongue,
I swallow the waxing moon to sing what’s never been sung.

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T. S. Davis is author of Sun + Moon Rendezvous and former producer of the Seattle Poetry Slam. His  poems, essays, and nonfiction have appeared in Rattle, The Lyric, Bellingham Review, 14 X 14, Blue Collar Review, Henhouse, and Point No Point, among others. Mr. Davis is a retired Registered Nurse who lives in rural Arizona and writes Shakespearian sonnets.

Whaler’s Journal: Christina

Christina & I would meet
in a whaler’s shack after the season.
She would walk up from Cape May Town
gathering shells & carvings of bone,
her carryall full with the leavings of tide
that she took home & hung from walls
as though she was determined
to live under the surface of sea.

She would stand in the doorway,
the mid-afternoon sun illuminating
her outline, as if she knew
how she looked with the sun
dancing around her,
then heave her carryall
up on the old table,
slide out of her cape,
take out shells & polished stones
& broken pieces of harpoon,
place them on the perimeter
of the scarred table
& lie down among the debris,
her fingers curved
around a conch shell
she always held to her ear.

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Kyle Laws is based out of Steel City Art Works in Pueblo, CO where she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance. Her collections include Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), This Town: Poems of Correspondence with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). With eight nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany. She is editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.