Author Archives: Sarah

Poets

Emily:...Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it…?
Stage Manager:...The saints and poets, maybe -- they do some.
							Our Town
On days when cicadas sing
we allow dragonflies
to light atop our wheelbarrow’s load
and give them safe passage
to the garden across the field.

We observe with holy envy
a cat’s meticluous patience
to count and clean with sandy tongue
every hair on its body,
perpetually purring serene.

Like the bee we consider
the lillies of this world, but then find
the golden tattoo of angels
hidden within the folds
of the rhododendron’s spring bloom.

During our walks we sometime pause
to pray at the roadside church
of the fallen sparrow, joining
its burgeoning congregation
of gathering crows.

We know that in the beginning
and begetting of a poem
there is the eternal blink of now,
the shared creation, the new creation,
the ordinary, always the word.

And while many of us have not
been boiled, pierced, or canonized,
we have sawed our words into staves,
let our pens sweat Gethsemane ink;
and when you ask us for a fish,
we will hold the stone and give you God.



John Hopkins has been an English teacher for forty-two years. He was the New England Association of Teachers of English (NEATE) poet of the year in 2008. John’s poetry has appeared in Commonweal, Saint Anthony Messenger, The National Catholic Reporter, The  Leaflet, Sr. Melannie Svoboda’s blog, “Sunflower Seeds,” The Catholic Poetry Room, Amethyst Review, and Father Timothy Joyce’s book Celtic Quest. For the past six years, John has been a Benedictine Oblate affiliated with Glastonbury Abbey in Hingham, Massachusetts. He loves to read, write letters, tramp the Blue Hills, and play pickleball with Kerry, his amazing wife, and mother of their wonderful children: Kate, Danny, and Brian. In February of 2021, John’s first book of poems, Celtic Nan, was published, and in February of 2023, his second book, Make My Heart a Pomegranate was published. You can reach John at brotherjohnnyhop@gmail.com.

Grace Suffices
After an Observation by Wittgenstein

Does our weight rest on shifting ground
or hang by gold wires from heaven?
We work and sleep, a dreary round 
stumbling over shifting ground,
afraid to kick the gray walls down,
faithless to pray: may grace be given
to wrest our weight from shifting ground
and rise on gold wires toward heaven.

Herons on slick river stones
are my emblem. Unafraid of
falling or drowning, they leap into
the air and oar themselves toward home,
doing what I long to do
but lack the beating wings of love.

J.S. Absher has published two full-length books of poetry, Skating Rough Ground (Kelsay Press, 2022) and Mouth Work (St. Andrews University Press), winner of the 2015 Lena Shull Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. Absher’s poems have won prizes from BYU Studies Quarterly and Dialogue and have recently been published or accepted by The McNeese Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Tar River Review. He lives in Raleigh, NC, with his wife, Patti. (www.jsabsherpoetry.com/) 

The Twilight Language

Before the sun sets, the landscape grows dense
And darkens into ambiguity.

All objects take on a significance 
At once familiar and hard to see.

What we dismissed as nothing new or strange—
Trees, stone, moss, fences, sky, stars, grass, river—
Speak to our hearts in the twilight language.

The boundaries of our bodies quiver,
And we dissolve like raindrops in the sea.

A lightning flash illuminates the gloom
Of all our furtive, momentary dreams. 

The mudras of the pine boughs pierce the moon’s
Mandala and the mantra of the wind
Chants wordless tones that still the storm within.

Lee Evans lives in Bath, Maine in retirement from the Maryland State
Archives and the Bath YMCA. He writes poetry whenever he cannot resist
the urge to do so.

To Time

It was You, wasn’t it, on the mountain
when the wind stopped,

and my soul welled into the quiet
to roll with the peaks through the clouds?

When in the forest, I felt the earth
in my roots and the wind in my leaves?

You the tenderness in me for the finch
who no longer alights from the eave when I pass.

If all that exists matters, how does the river 
carry on with calm assurance

when most days the smallness 
of my understanding is my best hope?

I feel You unfold sometimes
like a purple flower after a rainstorm  

as the pines drip spicy gold
into beams of old sunlight.

Then I want to love my way to You
straight through this body

and this sacred ground,
like a river.

To touch petals and plant seeds,
hold hands and scatter ashes.

I don’t need to ask 
if You’ll have me.

Does the river ask the ocean
if it’s ok to come home?

Jenna Wysong Filbrun is the author of the poetry collection, Away (Finishing Line Press, 2023).  Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and have appeared in publications such as Blue Heron Review, EcoTheo Review, Wild Roof Journal, and others.  Find her on Instagram @jwfilbrun or visit her website: https://jennawysongfilbrun.wixsite.com/poetry.

Agitation Wave

Starlings fly in the physique
of a palm tree or hanging traitor
to avoid avian predators.
You hold back to catch them, en route
to the village. If a village
becomes disreputable, is it still the same village?

To avoid the predator miraculous,
the sorcerer love, ordinary townsfolk 
coalesced like raindrops into a dark cloud, 
mimicked their neighbours, acted out cruelties
they could not have perpetrated alone.
A predator scourged and speared.

How do you recognise the semi-transfigured
on the road home? At first,
you do not. You no longer trust love, 
do not believe it to be what you had. 
But when you see it, you desire it
more than you desire your own breath.

It is too late by then,
but you witnessed a miracle. 
And, now, here comes the murmuration, 
an abundant obscuring of all the light 
the sorcerer took with him.
Remember that light, how you bathed in it?

The road is dusty, your skin 
riddled with dust. Heart given, and purified,
you will always be clean.

Carl Griffin is from South Wales. His first poetry collection, Throat of Hawthorn, was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2019. His book-length poem, Arrival at Elsewhere, written for charity with the help of one hundred poets, was published by Against the Grain Press in 2020

I Cried Out to My God in an Empty Sanctuary


& I cried to Him & He didn’t answer,
crying out to my own echoes,
to a wooden cross high on the organ pipes,
overlooking the altar, the lectern, the pulpit,

once alive with sermon. Tears flocked
my horizon, argued with the emptiness.
I cried out again, the pit of my stomach huge
& filled with sorrow. I wanted

to say my heart ached
while my shoulders slumped,
& each time my hands trembled, I prayed:
Listen to me, I said, strained flakes

of whisper exhaling into the stained glass
windows filtering autumn’s generous sky,
a blade of sunlight hanging in the corner
of my eye. I am undone. The heartbreak

of all the yellow of what should be
untucked the light, & I exhumed
the heave & surge from the grave
of my chest until all at once it was quiet

& I was stilled. & as I let Him take me,
let Him lift me up, consume me
for that second, let light fall in, let His spirit
fill my mouth & air, let Him be the God for me,

I felt the moment for what it was—
everything—all I am ever meant to feel,
my yesterdays & tomorrows
not yet fogging up the windows

where I wait, this wintering making ghosts
of my breath while my body
fills with beautiful, boundless
certainty that tomorrow 

everything will change, & I thanked Him.
& we sat side-by-side,
drawing breath between our breaths,
a minute of wellness in my unwell world.

Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of four collections and twenty-one chapbooks, among others. She is founder and publisher of ELJ Editions, Ltd., a 501(c)3 literary nonprofit. She hopes you’ll fall in love with her words. 

Walking Madonna
		
			Elisabeth Frink, bronze, 1981, Salisbury Cathedral 


The mother of God walks 
	away from the cathedral   
away from the closed shadows 
of its interior 
into the open green
of the world outside

Despite the drag of the long skirts
she strides

Her thin arms swing 	
	empty now	
these arms that held 
the tender flesh of her child
	 measured his growing
helped to carry him 	
from his place of execution
	prepared his body for the afterlife

She is slight   small   
as she makes her way
into the light    
of a cold blue morning sky
	ready to face the hard business 
of resurrection

Beth Brooke is a retired teacher who lives in Dorset. She has three published pamphlets and one of those, Transformations, has been nominated for the PEN Heaney Prize. She has been published in a number of print anthologies and journals and several online journals including Amethyst. The most exciting thing about her is her beautiful grandson.

Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=138966572

Yesterday’s Making

At times, the colors
are slow to wake. He turns them over,
finds their edges with a brush, with a stone
and with the sun, prepares a space.
He lifts a canvas and, beneath a window
the threads of yesterday’s Making
are feathers in the dawn-light, minerals, and prayer, and dust
rising gold.
He listens to their memory.
He sings them back to the Maker, and waits.

Kimberly Beck: Kim is a quiet, listening soul, who lives in Washington State. She can often be found at a local therapy ranch, caring for a very special herd of Norwegian Fjord Horses. She believes that horses are some of the best teachers when it comes to listening and writing poetry. 

The Integrity of Doubt

There's nothing left but doubt
so do what you say and think
in the knowledge that it means
indifference is justified and you
must embrace the constant hum 
of anxiety and always question 
meaning. Disinformation has 
far-reaching consequences
so you are right to make use of 
it whenever you can. Commit
infractions, interfere, make use
of accelerometers and adopt
unethical behaviour. There is 
no question that AI is artificial 
and unintelligent; make sure
failure helps you win, seize 
every opportunity for religious
shenanigans whilst you cast 
the seeds of doubt. The truth
of something is always in
direct relation to its untruth,
to mystical revelation, visions,
poems, songs and inspired lies.
The world to come is only
for those who recuperate
enough to make the journey.
There can be no affirmation,
you must believe in doubt.

Rupert M Loydell is a writer, editor and abstract artist. His many books of poetry include Dear Mary (Shearsman, 2017) and The Return of the Man Who Has Everything (Shearsman 2015); and he has edited anthologies such as Yesterday’s Music Today (co-edited with Mike Ferguson, Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2014), and Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: manifestos and unmanifestos (Salt, 2010)

My First Tree

The first tree I remember was a giant oak 
behind my boyhood home, 
the marker between the driveway and the garden. 

When I was six, I jumped and hung on the lowest branch, 
jumped up and down clinging to the spring of that branch 
hoping that I had the weight to break it. 

Our neighbor, Earnest Ozales, came and stopped me. 
He explained to me the tree was a living thing 
and the same way I didn’t want to be hurt it didn’t want to be hurt. 

He showed me the smallest twig at the tip of the branch
was like my finger, not to be broken. 
He had escaped the Nazis, was an arborist in Latvia. 

Now, every forest is my sanctuary, 
every tree is my upright companion,
pillars of praise to created mercy, 
the ground from which everything springs. 

Frank Desiderio, CSP, a poet, priest, and TV producer has served as a pastor, campus minister, retreat director and author (Can You Let Go of a Grudge, Paulist Press, 2014).  He produced the film Judas for ABC TV (2004) and several documentaries for cable television.  His poems have appeared in the Spring Hill Review, Windhover, Ars Medica, Moving Image: Poetry Inspired by Film among other journals. He and his sister, Mimi Moriarty, authored the chapbook Sibling Revery (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Currently he lives in Manhattan.