Author Archives: Sarah

a pilgrim’s faith
 
gray overcast afternoon
he stands foot forward atop 
one end of a tightrope so high
looking down
the deep is just a blur
almost imperceptible
 
the martyrs say it’s best to refrain 
from downcast glances 
so he fixates forward 
the invisible other end
a destination so far 
beyond there’s not 
a single hint of horizon
 
all around mostly silence 
as with his every cautious step
and few and far between 
a dirge hums across the mesosphere
 
the pilgrimage so long
it seems mid-journey in perpetuity
no matter how much distance
his caved soles have covered
 
and nobody knows that longing 
itself secretly longs 
to cease being a word
but he’ll get there
first
 
 

Karlo Sevilla is the author of seven poetry collections, including the full-length Metro Manila Mammal (Soma Publishing, 2018) and the self-published Figuratively: A Chapbook of Shape Poems (2024). Shortlisted for the 2021 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition and thrice nominated for the Best of the Net, his poems appear in Philippines Graphic, Philippines Free Press, PILGRIM: A Journal of Catholic Experience, The Catholic Poetry Room, Academy of the Heart and Mind, and others. He is a 2024 International Fellow of the International Human Rights Arts Movement (IHRAM) for poetry.

Inventory

“How will I know?” my mother asked in a thin voice over the phone. If we’d been joking around—something she still relished with advanced cancer—I might have replied, “It’s like what the Supreme Court said about pornography; you’ll know it when you see it.”

But that night my elderly mother was pensive, her words unusually clear despite the heavy pain medication. “Nobody can tell me the signs,” she said. “How will I know when it’s close?”

I glanced at the rosary on my night table, tangled with a phone-charger and wrapper for a collagen face mask. “There’s signs,” I said, my throat thickening. Sleeping most of the day while drinking and eating less were huge clues, I suspected. My mother could check off both.       

“Want me to call hospice?” I said. “Or ask Brenda?” My cousin was an oncologist.      

My mother paused, and I could hear her drawing in air. “It’s hard to pray right now,” she said. “I’ve read it can be like that.”

In the past, I had suggested meditative exercises that I learned from the Examen of St. Ignatius. A former soldier, Ignatius had secluded himself in a cave and composed a frank self-inventory. But TBH, as my high school students would say, now I wasn’t praying much either. 

“Mom,” I said. “How are you on medicine? Paperwork?”

U.S. Insurance plans tend to cover grief counseling for 13 months, purposely extending four weeks past the anniversary of one’s loss. Three years after my mother’s death, I still wonder if her skill at comforting others may have inadvertently stunted my own ability to calm myself, like a baby who never learned to “self soothe.”

During her final months, I sometimes slipped into the small school chapel at work. For weeks, I tried to offer specific intentions for my mother, but my mind balked. Remaining in the pew felt wrong, like an insomniac lingering fruitlessly in bed.       

“My mom had the most frightened look on her face when she died,” my mother told me one day. “Not like those people who see a light.”

I sat up on her carpet where I was deflating my air-mattress. “You sure, Mom?” I said. “Maybe she was squinting?”  

My mother shook her head. “It was the most awful thing, seeing the look in her eyes.”

The mattress sagged as I tried unsuccessfully to recall my Grandma Curtin’s pale blue eyes from visits to her hospital bed, some 30 years before. 

“The soul does what it needs to,” our second hospice nurse told me shortly afterwards, when we moved my mother into a unit, and I had sheepishly asked if she knew how long my mother might have left.  

I tried visiting the school chapel again, two weeks before my mother died. Looking over at the altar for the Virgin of Guadalupe, I stared at her starry green cape and remembered something. More than a decade before, when one of my promising teen students had died violently, our stunned school held a memorial service. But at the time, I felt too filled with shock and anger to even think about praying. I remembered telling my mother that I felt like a teen myself, blaming God for everything bad.      

My mother listened and said, “Try praying to Enrique.”   

Praying to a bright and sarcastic teen didn’t strike me as the best solution, but a quick and awkward attempt showed it might create more opportunities for honesty. The thick tightness in my chest had loosened just a little. Now, as I sat back the pew years later, I tried my mother’s method again.    

Grandmother, mother, daughter: we all helped carry each other’s anxiety, part of the genetic twisting that marked us kin. Shortly after my mother moved to hospice, my family and I spent the afternoon with her. We updated her like normal, about my daughter’s college science classes and part-time job selling doughnuts, my son’s new clarinet lessons, and even the plot of the film “Gattaca.” Despite heavy sedation, my mother’s pale face had flickered with recognition at our banter. When we left that day, we had crowded around my mother’s bed and said her favorite prayer, from St. Francis of Assisi. 

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is error, the truth;
where there is doubt, the faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

A few hours later, my brother called to say that my mother had passed away while he and his family sat with her.  

“Was she scared?” I asked in a trembling voice. 

“No,” my brother said. “The nurse told us that after you guys left, it was like she was ready.”

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Carolyn Alessio lives and works on Chicago’s Southwest Side. Her writing has appeared in The Pushcart Prize anthology, Chicago Tribune and Sweet. Two of her essays were named Notable for Best American Essays.

Atmospheric

the ones who loved me
into existence are gone
with them went their souls

but, then, if souls are
energies decentralized
when our bodies die

I choose to conclude
that their love now surrounds me
in all directions

Amy Wilde is a writer in Austin, Texas. Her poetry, reportage, and essays have appeared in Poets for Science, Lonely Planet, The Collective Quarterly, and elsewhere, and her creative nonfiction work was shortlisted in the Ploughshares 2024 Emerging Writer’s Contest. Her newsletter, Brown Paper Packages, offers shareable pleasures and connective ideas for These Here Times.

A Red-Winged Bird

A simple thing
like a red-winged bird
feeding on seed left for it
in a yellow wooden birdhouse
sends me into a deep reverie.
How often we exercise dominion
with kindness, giving sustenance
to living things that can give us
no reward but for the beauty
they bring us with their mere existence.
Our bond with them is a covenant,
a resistance to the void of space
and the threat of time.
Just a flash of a red wing
leads our eyes up
and is more than enough
to bring us to our knees
and humble us.

Cynthia Pitman, author of three poetry collections, The White Room, Blood Orange, and Breathe (Kelsay Books), has been published in Amethyst Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Spirit Fire, Third Wednesday (One Sentence Poem finalist), Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art (Pushcart Prize nominee), and other journals, and in Vita Brevis Press anthologies Pain and Renewal, Brought to Sight & Swept Away, Nothing Divine Dies, and What is All This Sweet Work?

Children of the Middle River
						--for the Osage


The Earth and the Moon,
footsteps in the dust on a road
to purity, dreams the very breath
of spirits, their voices beyond
each spoken word, tongues planting
bulbs like truths in the heart, like seeds
birthing from the soil, water and air,
knowing the need to be nourished
by the milk of their Mother, sustained
by her to endure each day, each month,
and year, the river renewing the future
as the Earth and the Moon move,
so that all living Nations might grow,
the rocks and trees flowing
silently within us.

Mark B. Hamilton works in ecopoetry, often focused on the riparian zone of the Missouri River, where he has traveled extensively by kayak. His special interests include: First Nations cosmologies, pre-industrial America, and the poetics of change.

Recent poetry volumes are: LAKE, RIVER, MOUNTAIN (2024), the chapbook UPSTREAM (2024), and OYO: The Beautiful River (2020). A forthcoming volume of traditional verse, 1803: The Wintering, a history-based book founded upon research and field studies on Lewis and Clark, will be published in 2026. View additional author info at: MarkBHamilton.WordPress.com

Shabbos After Shiva

The Shabbos after I sat shiva for my son,
I lit candles 18 minutes before sunset
somehow not questioning the point of blessings
when I was burning with the flame I’d lost. 

The crystal candlesticks stood on the sideboard, 
as they had since the day he’d handed them to me
in a paper bag with a grin, “A souvenir for you, Mom, 
found in an Israeli street market.” And like any other 
Friday night I kindled lights as commanded.

Not for any stray belief in a benevolent power,
after watching him wither by bits in a hospital bed, 
but because I needed something in my life
to remain unchanged. So that Friday night 
I covered my eyes and recited Hebrew words 
learned from my mother when I was barely 
taller than her aproned waist.

And somehow it helped—to do what I 
always did at the same time in the same way,
making it possible the next morning to put my feet 
on the floor and choose clothes from the closet.

I still light candles on Friday evenings, 
still clinging to what sustained my own flame
through those first weeks of fresh grief.
 

Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications. Visit her online at http://www.jacquelinejules.com.

Gran

My gran was Irish, said her rosary
Before a lithograph above her bed
Of Jesus sweating at Gethsemane. 

The other mysteries then were overspread
By agony and its pervasive pall,
Their glory and their joy suffused with dread.

Yet maybe that’s not how she felt at all
And prayed the manger scene with joyful mien
Full seeing where the baby’s fate would fall. 

More likely yet she sensed each mystery’s sheen
Was color only, not the deeper tone
That pulsed beneath His human life unseen.

She too had knelt and sweated by the stone
And, even with the angel, 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, Pensive Journal, America Magazine, The Society of Classical Poets, and various venues of the Benedictine monastery with which he is an oblate. He is editor of The Catholic Poetry Room page on the Integrated Catholic Life website.

Beyond Beyond

Subatomic particles revolve beyond beyond—
boom! The universe is born, evolved beyond beyond.

Watch the nimble gods of rain tiptoe cloud to cloud
as lightning, thunder, hailstones, sleet resolve beyond beyond.

God in human flesh dies, crying out why has thou 
forsaken me? Are all sins thus absolved beyond beyond?

Ever since Shams sent Rumi whirling into ecstasy
Rumi’s dervishes have circumvolved beyond beyond.

When lovers slip gold bands over their knuckles, who knows how long 
their vows will last—must all bonds dissolve beyond beyond?

I have no catchy name, I only go by John. And yet,
when I do tai chi chuan, cloud hands revolve beyond beyond.

John Whitney Steele is a psychologist, yoga teacher, assistant editor of Think: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction and Essays, and graduate of the MFA Poetry Program at Western Colorado University. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his poems have been published widely. His chapbook, The Stones Keep Watch, and his full length collection of poetry, Shiva’s Dance, were published by Kelsay Books in 2021 and 2022.

When you travel, you find yourself
Alone in a different way,
More attentive now
To the self you bring along,
Your more subtle eye watching.
You abroad; and how what meets you
Touches that part of the heart
That lies low at home:

—John O’Donohue

Tucked between jagged grey rocks and emerald hills, Coumeenoole Beach is desolate. Limestone cliffs extend their bony fingers into the sea, stirring up white caps. If I close my eyes, it feels as if the wind is trying to blow me off the very edge of Europe. Here on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula, the Atlantic is ferocious this morning, the Blasket isles, mere shadows in the fog. 

Head bent down like the biblical widow searching for a lost coin, I scour the sand for treasures, eventually dropping a few stones into my coat pocket. Olive-colored with tiny ridges, the stones are not showy, but precious enough. 

My daughter Abby, a Cork resident until her VISA expires in May, is snapping photos of me on her cell. Save for a few seabirds staking out a tidal pool, we are alone. At first, I mistake the birds for gannets, a giant, white seabird with a wingspan of nearly six feet. They dive for their prey, speeding at 60 miles an hour with such a voracious appetite that humans who share their zest for meals are called gannets. But the tour guide later corrects me. These are your garden variety gulls- the gannets, thousands of them, are on nearby islands, but not here.

Wrapped in our winter parkas on this April morning, my daughter and I are the only tourists from our bus braving the wind and drizzle and fog that has finally lifted enough to see several hundred yards into the surf. I am grateful for the mist that is seeping into my skin like an anointing. Blessed to be in this mystical place.

 And yet, I am conscious that the “self I brought along” to Ireland is fraught with anxiety. When good things happened in my life, they seemed too good to endure. Many years ago, I had a short reading with a seer recommended by a dear friend. The seer took my hand and declared that I evolved from a line of worriers and doomsayers. Deep in remote Carpathian villages, my Rusyn ancestors behaved as if the sword of Damocles was swinging above their heads. This rang true. As a child, I worried that my father, who struggled with bipolar disorder, would lose a newfound job, plunging our household into chaos and the need to buy powdered milk. 

As an adult, I feared that my life would unravel to the point that I would become homeless. As a single mother, I worried when I had to play bill roulette, carefully calculating how long I could postpone paying until something got turned off. That sword dangled in my orbit for years. Even today, I catch its glint.

 ********************************************************************

 in Dublin, I wait in line at Trinity College to view the iconic Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript of four gospels created by monks twelve hundred years ago. It is breathtaking, as is the college’s Long Hall, which contains 200,000 of the college’s oldest books and is guarded by marble busts of philosophers and writers. Floating above the literary gold is Gaia, a 3-D image of earth fashioned by NASA. It is as if the earth has escaped its orbit and has come to inhabit this austere hall. 

 Not far away, St. Stephen’s Green, a leafy urban refuge, was opened by Sir Arthur Guinness during the Victorian era. Now overflowing with flower beds and tourists, this park figured in the 1916 Rising when the Irish staged an Easter Day rebellion against the British. An English noblewoman named Countess Constance Markievicz brandished a pistol as second in command. I stare at the gazebo where she helped feed the 400 Irish insurgents, at the bullet holes in the park’s stone archway and wonder if one bullet was meant for her. Was she ever scared? At the nearby Museum of Dublin, I learn that another woman leader was wounded but survived. Among other bits of knowledge, I learn about the horrors of the Magdalen Laundries that imprisoned nearly 10,000 “fallen” women, forcing them to perform unpaid manual labor. Run by Catholic nuns, these laundries existed into the 1990s. Their babies were often sold. Many died. It is a testimony to the unparalleled power of the catholic church in this country, and tendency of countries to bury their shame by collective consent. I think of the thousands of indigenous children in the US forcibly removed to boarding schools where they could be “cleansed” of their culture and language. 

 At St. Stephens, I follow a gravel path to a memorial commemorating the one million Irish lives lost to the Great Famine. There are three emaciated figures in bronze, one extending a ladle to a seated individual. The abstract sculpture is heartbreaking in its starkness. Later I will hear a tour guide talk about the famine houses, abandoned by desperate families who left their homes in search of food; many died on the way. At a famine museum outside of Cork, there is a blackened cauldron that was used to boil nettles and herbs soup. By confiscating land and crops other than the virus laden potato, the British starved the Irish. Small wonder that the Irish have a deep affinity with the Gazans, nearly 50,000 of whom have perished from Israeli bombs before a fragile ceasefire was reached in early 2025, allowing for freeing of Israeli hostages seized when Hamas launched a terrorist attack in October 2023.  On an office building overlooking the Liffey River in Dublin, a giant banner silently demands “Ceasefire Now.”

                                      ***

Rolling through the hills and fields west of Killarney to the Dingle Peninsula, County Kerry is a mosaic of green patches, blackened turf (peat) burned as fuel, although this practice is largely banned today. Like nature’s leafy chessboard, hedgerows serve as fences for owners whose sheep roam freely through the hills. These are Ireland’s rain forests some centuries-old, offering food and shelter to animals and birds. Viewing this landscape from his plane, Johnny Cash was inspired to write “Forty Shades of Green.” when he returned from his first trip to Ireland.

 Amid the lush green, baby lambs are glued to their mothers, each marked with splashes of color to identify owners. The sheep resemble woolly canvasses streaked with red and blue, as if kindergartners ran wild through the fields with paintbrushes. 

Roadsides are thick with gorse, spiny evergreen bushes with flowers the color of butter. It is said that the gorse provided the yellow used in the Book of Kells. I am lucky to be visiting in early April since gorse only blooms for two weeks every spring, nature’s reminder that life’s beauty is fleeting. Virginia Woolf urged her readers to “see the colors of the world.” I gratefully soak in the greens of the hedgerows, gray of the ancient stones as soft as dove tails, the glorious yellow of the gorse. 

                    ********

Off the coast of Dingle lie the Great Blasket islands, uninhabited for decades, save for thousands of gannets and gulls, even puffins. On this foggy day, I can barely make out the outline of the largest island. It conjures ghosts of families eking out an existence here. Men going out to fish in traditional curachs- boats of wicker frames covered with canvass. Children gather turf and heaters to burn fuel. There is a story of a young boy falling off a cliff while gathering heather for his family. 

One of the most venerated Irish storytellers lived on Great Blasket, raising eleven children (only six of whom survived to adulthood) and helping keep alive the Irish language for younger generations. At the end of her life, Peig Sayers dictated her autobiography to her son chronicling her years on what she called “this lonely rock in the middle of the great sea.” 

On the day that Peig buried her fourth child, she wrote,” “I sat on the bank above the beach where I had a splendid view all around me. Dead indeed is the heart from which the balmy air of the sea cannot banish sorrow or grief.” Peig died in 1958, long after her children had migrated to Massachusetts.

The balmy air, roadside bouquets of gorse, jagged cliffs and white caps that rushed to meet them, what do I carry home from this place?

 I am turning 70 years old in August; my well-ordered life is unfurling as planned after less than well-ordered decades. I bought my first home last year. Piled up modest retirement savings. Moved to Michigan to be near my youngest daughter who will have her first baby- my first grandchild- in June. All of this is good. Desirable. And I am grateful for all of it.

 But as I gaze at the Blasket Islands draped in fog, and rub the stones in my pocket, I yearn for something else. Something deeper. Something I cannot yet define but it is there all the same. Mystery perhaps. All that has been elusive in my life – until now. I am reading John O’Donohue’s blessing, ‘For the Traveler.’

When you travel,
A new silence 
Goes with you.
And if you listen
You will hear
What your heart would 
Love to say.

•  

In The Gift of Years, Growing Older Gracefully human rights advocate and spiritual writer Joan Chittister offers this on Mystery: 

“A blessing of these years is coming to see that behind everything so stolid, so firm so familiar, in front of us runs a descant of mystery and meaning to be experienced in ways we never thought possible….In this new world, a mountain, a bench, a grassy path, is far more than simply itself. It is a symbol of unprecedented possibilities, of the holiness of time.”

On wild and breathtaking Coumeenoole Beach, swimming is banned because the currents are so unpredictable. Yet underneath the fury of crashing waves and wind, I can hear a still small voice whispering,” Live fully. Take risks. The time is now.”

And banish, at all costs, the menacing sword.

Excerpts from the blessing, 'For the Traveler.'
John O'Donohue
To Bless the Space Between Us (US) / Benedictus (Europe)

Marcy Darin is an award-winning Detroit-based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Ms.,Chicago Tribune, Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Braided Way, Persimmon Tree, and in the anthology, Finding Light in Unexpected Places, published by Palamedes Press, among other publications. She has three adult children and a seven-month-old granddaughter, who is her light! She is working on a collection of essays on being a lifelong sojourner. You can read more of her work at marcydarin.com.

Dear God, 

Let me live my life as if nothing is ever too small for me to love, 
not the fork I am washing and placing back in the drawer, 
not the dust I pick up from the corners.  
Let me absorb each sound, each morning bird, each motorcycle passing, 
each snowflake touching rock or soil
as if this were my last chance to really discover what it means to be living.  
Let me not pretend I have the answers 
but let me wait for whatever it is that comes to us when we wait, 
the lily, the leopard, the dark, 
then let me reach past what comes too quickly and ask, again, for God—
who comes slowly, one thing at a time.
Let me feel how it feels, this moment now.  
Let me find meaning through what I am able to love 
and release, love and release.  
A crow in wind.  
            A house in flames.  
                          Your hand in my dreams.  

Tani Arness lives in beautiful Albuquerque, NM. She’s been inspired by hours spent stargazing in Northern NM. Tani’s work can be found in Tzimtzum: 5 contemporary poets lend us their hearts, and numerous literary magazines including North American Review, Malpais Review, and Crab Orchard Review. See also: www.tani-arness.com.