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Lost Sounds of St Kilda

You are here: the past

dividing the discord
of a fulmar catch
fowling for gannets
in psalm-soaked gorse
gathering storm songs
Scots and Norse.

On the verge of the world:

cave of spells
still rock of ruins moving
first page of Exodus
left sleeping
whitewashed
on a brae of weeping.

Helen Ross is a teacher of History in Glasgow. She has published in a range of academic and popular history magazines but has only recently started writing poetry.

Too Many Things
––after Neruda

Shells combine with stones
and the whole beach with moonlight.
The surf rolls over the seawall,
and all the houses of the world
are flattened by wind.
No one can hold a pebble’s shadow.
No one can touch the sun’s corona.
All of us are sand under sand.
They have spoken to me of space,
of infinity and black holes.
I have no idea what they are saying.
I only know the hand of the clock
and I know it has no stillness.
When I lived in the holidays
I praised the glow of melting
butter, and the sky
blushed. It is so large,
the mountain which fans into the sea.
When I wake every morning
who embraces me or doesn’t?
And when I sleep
who prays that I’ll rejoice when I wake?
This means to say that slowly
we have taken to the hills, and
now we roll like dropped fruit.
I have a mind to combine things,
mess them up, give them handles,
paint them, disassemble them
until all sound in the world
has the deep timbre of the river.

Joel Moskowitz, an artist and retired picture framer,
lives with his wife and cat in Maynard, Massachusetts. His poems have appeared​ in J Journal, Naugatuck River Review, Midstream,
The Healing Muse, and Whiskey Island Magazine;  and the online journals Muddy River Review, Boston Poetry Magazine and Soul-Lit. He is a First Prize winner of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire National Contest.

Faith’s Haven

The page of day resides, smudged, when
dragged across a sheet of gray sleet,
granite and asphalt.

Automobiles encapsulate the frail
seeds of life, safe within their metal pods
surrounded in a placenta of devises,
suspended within straps;
the sky glowers.

A hairpin curve between jagged cliffs
seeps moisture upon the chill laden
surface of the road waiting, waiting;
the car and its driver
lulled by rock music,
speed on.

In the sacred space of an indrawn breath
the car slides, unanchored; its windows vibrating;
its wipers swishing, its driver stunned;
a watercolor view of peaceful death
rises with the disturbed leaves
uncontrolled by man, God’s
black-ice rules.

Yet, today is not the day;
life is re-gifted within the sanctuary of
space-time; the bumper brushes
the briars of nascent spring and stops,
facing wrong way, turning right,
fulfilling the haven of faith.

Deborah Guzzi writes full time. Her third book, The Hurricane, is available through Prolific Press. Her poetry appears in Allegro, Artificium, Shooter & The Foxglove Journal in the UK, Existere, The Ekphrastic Review, Scarlet Leaf Review & Subterranean Blue Poetry, Canada – Tincture, Australia – mgv2>publishing, France Cha: Asian Review, China – Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Australia – The Scarlet Leaf Review – Greece, Ribbons, pioneertown, Sounding Review, Bacopa Literary Review, The Aurorean, Liquid Imagination, The Tishman Review, Page & Spine & others in the USA.

Job’s Wife

There was once a woman in the land of Uz whose name was
Job’s Wife.
What do we know about her?
Not much.
She bears Job seven sons and three daughters,
the story goes.
Do the math: pregnant for seven and a half years,
raises those babies to successful adulthood.
That’s at least twenty years.
And mostly alone,
as Job spends his days with God and ‘friends’.
A great wind comes across the desert,
knocks a son’s house down, killing all the offspring,
who are never called hers,
though she carries them in her womb,
brings them into the world,
cradles, feeds, comforts, teaches, challenges, loves them.
She is remembered only as a scold, with that one mysterious line:
‘Curse/bless God, and die,’ she tells Job,
perhaps tired of his neglect
as if she is not there,
of the endless focus on his problems,
great though they are,
she is there
suffering as much or more.
For her only recorded words,
Job calls her foolish,
and we hear no more of her.
Job’s fortunes are restored,
including another seven sons and three daughters.
Where did they come from?
Do the math: pregnant for seven and a half years,
raises those babies to successful adulthood.
That’s at least twenty years
raising the new children of Job,
who died old and full of days.
Where is Job’s Wife?
What is her name?
Is her heart not broken a thousand fold?

Jennifer Reek holds a PhD from the Centre for Literature, Theology and the Arts, University of Glasgow. She is author of A Poetics of Church: Reading and Writing Sacred Spaces of Poetic Dwelling (2018) and co-editor of the forthcoming Thresholds of Wonder: Poetry, Philosophy and Theology in Conversation.

The Summoner

“What Jew has a wake?”

The young woman, Merika, turned at that familiar volume, that comforting loudness. She remembered being enveloped by it so often. A little girl protected by a blanket of voice.

“Uncle Mel!” She wrapped her arms around his neck, still having to stand on tip-toe to do it. Melchizedek Weir was 6’ 2’’ if he were an inch, and age had not stooped him a bit. Nor quieted him.

“The kind of Jew,” she answered, “who hated being one.”

Rabbi Weir looked over at his dead friend, still characteristically tieless. Still scowling, despite the undertaker’s best efforts to the contrary. The Order of the Red Star still manifestly pinned to his chest.

“He missed you,” Merika managed a smile.

“He was the one who moved clear across the continent,” his friend replied.

“He said it was to get away from you,” she whispered, though they were alone in the parlour, excepting the dark-suited attendant, doing his best to stand still as the room’s thin, flared lamps.

“More to get you away from me, Pits’l.” It had been a long time since anyone had called her “adorable child.” She could never remember her father doing it.

They sat down together on the mandatory, burgundy cushioned, metal folding chairs. — the elderly rabbi, whom his congregants described as “the ageless elder,” and the grieving young woman for whom he was now her only family, even if not actually related. “Uncle” is a very fluid term.

“Who was my mother?” Merika asked, right out. No warm up, no sidling in. One of the many things Mel admired about her. “He wouldn’t ever tell me.”

“He couldn’t.” Melchizedek turned his amber eyes directly toward hers. Many a theological debater had been caught in that amber, unable to proceed. But for his niece, his gaze was translucent, right down to the heart.

“Because you didn’t have one.”

Marika’s eyes widened, although you’d have to look close to see it. “Ocular albinism” – her eyes had no color at all. Just white, pupils, iris, and all. Each only the slightest of white silhouettes, one upon the other.

She looked up at the discoloration where the cross had been taken down from the papered wall for the occasion.

“Didn’t that only happen once before?” she managed a weak laugh, “and it didn’t turn out so well for that Jew, either?”

She turned a little from the rabbi and scanned the unoccupied rows. “The University sent flowers,” she motioned to arrangement behind the coffin, “but nobody came. Better this way.” She exhaled, as if for the first time in a while. “No one to tell me that ‘he really did love me.’ ”

“He didn’t, Pits’l.” Soft amber bluntness. “You weren’t his.”

“Then whose, Uncle?” She stood up, animated. The attendant remained unmoved. “Yours?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Seriousness filled the empty room.

She flopped to her knees, sat on her heals before him. “Please, Uncle. Enough mystery! Tell me!”

Rabbi Mel, with surprising grace, slid himself down from the chair and sat, lotus pose, in front of her. Lowered his bearded chin and inhaled deeply. Only then did Marika notice the silver ॐ in the center of his kippa.

He looked up at her. “Do you remember the game we used to play when you were little, sitting just like this?”

“The Dream Game.” She smiled finally. “We’d close our eyes, and you’d lead me to The Dream Place. It was so beautiful.” She closed her eyes and mused. “A golden field of tall grasses. It was so real.”

“It was real, little one.” He took her hand. “It was no dream.”

She looked up at him then, and the shadows of her eyes seemed to remember something. To deepen.

“Your strange old Uncle Mel is a shaman, dear one. Did you know that’s a Hebrew word? A shaman and a mizemann. A summoner.”

“And did you summon me?’ she said, so softly that her father’s soul, still lingering for its three days, could not hear her.

Melchizedek rose to his full height and gently raised her with him.

“A shaman walks between this world and Spirit World.” He was almost intoning. “A summoner can call upon the spirits of the passed to meet him or her in the sedah zahav, the Golden Field, at the border between worlds. There, questions can be conveyed from the living and answered by the dead.”

“Was I . . . am I . . . dead?” There was no fear in her voice. It would explain so much.

“No, no,” the rabbi shook his salt and saffron hair, (red became Russian Jews). “Avikai and I were friends in the old country. In Stalingrad. The siege changed us both. The death. The despair. I turned even more closely to YHVH Elhoim, and His mercy; your father to the Party and its promises.”

“Even when he came here, he never abandoned it,” Marika replied. ‘Stalin, Khrushchev, they were traitors to the Revolution,’ he would say.”

“We fought about it constantly,” the old Rebbe sighed. “He called my gifts ‘a syringe for the opiate of the people.’ I challenged him to try it for himself, to let experience be his teacher, if not me.

“One night, he came to my flat and demanded a demonstration. I went into shaman state, the trance. He asked to speak to the soul of a dead sister, killed by the Nazis.”

“I never heard of a sister?” Marika puzzled.

“Nor had I. But I knew his father had been married before and widowed. I should have realized what was truly happening, but I was too intent on showing Avikai up. I made the request.”

Every muscle in Marka’s face tensed itself into the silent question, “And?”
It was the first time in her life she had ever known the man before her to be hesitant. The first time in his, as well.

His eyes travelled around the room, as if trying to escape from amber. But there was no escape now.

“There was no sister,” the old man continued. “Your father just hoped to catch me concocting some elaborate message from a non-existent soul. So he could say, “Aha! All lies! Just as I knew!

“But Spirit is not mocked. If a mizemann called up a non-existent spirit, it became existent. A new life, a new soul would be born, right there in the Border Lands. Motherless, fatherless, it would attach itself to whomever perpetrated the fraud, to whomever had blasphemed against the Spirit.”

Marika lowered herself back down upon the burgundy-flecked, beige carpet.

“I screamed in my trance, ‘What have you done?!’ There, nestled in the tall golden grasses, was the most beautiful baby girl I had ever seen, with eyes the color of stillness. The stillness of Spirit World.

“I saw those eyes again, on your father’s doorstep, where you had mysteriously appeared, wrapped in a weave of golden grasses. He was afraid to pick you up, to take you in. He called me.

“I . . . I am a dybbuk? A demon?”

“No, no, not at all.” He bent to reassure her, the palms of his hands softly on the crown of her head. Like blessing.

“You are your own unique category of being, Pits’l,” he murmured. “A nefesh nefeshim. A spirit of spiritualness.”

She stood up, approached Avikai’s body.

“He named me ‘Marika.’ It means –”

“ ‘Empty.’ Yes, I know.” He placed a hand on her shoulder, like supporting someone saying kaddish.

“You stayed with me three days while he flew to Tel Aviv, picked up the adoption certificate I’d arranged from a former student in government there, and flew back. I begged him to leave you with me, but you know your father. Wouldn’t give the satisfaction.”

Melchizedek stared hard at the permanently scowling face below him.
“He couldn’t love you. You gave the lie to his cherished view of the universe, of true and false. In the end, he chose to continue false. With his beliefs. With you.

“And he feared you. And feared our love for each other, beloved uncle, beloved niece. Feared what I might tell you. That is why he eventually took the university post 3000 miles away. I sent letters, but I’m sure you never received them. Then came email, Facebook.”

“Tell me, Uncle,” she turned to him urgently, as if she might not be able to speak the words a moment later. “Is this why I’ve been unable to love? I thought I was just . . . cold. A victim of my father’s coldness. But ‘cold’ is not what I feel! I hear the Oneness singing in me! I feel the intimacy of all things. Only – I cannot seem to feel the intimacy of one for another.”

She hung her head, and so did not see the tall, ruddy-haired young man enter the parlour and stand next to her uncle. He must have been remarkably gentle-stepped.

“This is my son. Also Mel. Meli’ah. It means ‘Fullness.’ ”

Marika looked up, and saw eyes the color of stillness smiling back at her.

“My Avigail (of blessed memory) and I could have no children. One day, I asked Spirit to speak with a non-existent nephew.”

“Shabbat shalom,” the tall young man extended his hand.

“It is not the Blessed Day,” Marika replied. No sidling.

“Oh, but it is,” he responded. She noticed not a single scowl-line on his face.

Wayne-Daniel Berard teaches English and Humanities at Nichols College in Dudley, MA. Wayne-Daniel is a Peace Chaplain, an interfaith clergy person, and a member of B’nai Or of Boston. He has published widely in both poetry and prose, and is the co-founding editor of Soul-Lit, an online journal of spiritual poetry. His latest chapbook is Christine Day, Love Poems. He lives in Mansfield, MA with his wife, The Lovely Christine.

A Curve in the Road

 
Fleeting—waves of fog slip over
the shape of our car, traveling at
a speed that could stop your heart
if you were standing in the middle
of the road.

………………………….Imagine this—

 
This strange migration, passing with
our low beams trapped inside the cab
of a car that cuts its speed as we sail
by—the driver’s head glows like Saint
Christopher’s— a sight that makes us

struggle with details we’ve forgotten.
Who protects us when we least expect
it? Our travel— weightless now, we
float into fog’s unfolding— our
second thoughts.

M.J. Iuppa  is the Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor Program and Lecturer in Creative Writing at St. John Fisher College; and since 2000 to present, is a part time lecturer in Creative Writing at The College at Brockport. Since 1986, she has been a teaching artist, working with students, K-12, in Rochester, NY, and surrounding area. Most recently, she was awarded the New York State Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Adjunct Teaching, 2017. She has four full length poetry collections, This Thirst (Kelsay Books, 2017), Small Worlds Floating (2016) as well as Within Reach (2010) both from Cherry Grove Collections; Night Traveler (Foothills Publishing, 2003); and 5 chapbooks. She lives on a small farm in Hamlin NY.

Book Review: A Spoon of Honey by Ion Corcos Flutter Press, 2018

This is a beautifully evocative chapbook in which unforced, resonant details draw the reader into nuanced reflection. In his author note, Corcos describes himself as ‘travelling indefinitely’ with his partner, and the themes of rest and of restlessness are entwined throughout these poems, many of which are situated in the Greek islands, and several of which confirm that the speaker is seeking more than the experiences of a fair-weather tourist (‘Winter in Crete’). The Mediterranean details are gorgeous in themselves – the walnut trees, the olive groves, the snow-capped mountains – but there is absence, rain, the unseasonal too, freighted with memory and the ever-present challenge of communication.

The title poem sets up a ripple of expectation, question, and elusive almost-answer, and this is a significant, sustained note throughout. Questions can be enigmatic – ‘What if I told you that I was a bird, a calf/ A gust of wind?’ (‘Walnut Tree’); and the mundane juxtaposed with the serious – ‘will you find the teapot you have been looking for/ the teacups, the broken table,/ the words your father/ cannot say to you?’ (‘After’). The koan-like answers frequently invite a shift of perception, of our belief in the solidity of the self: ‘The stone is not heavy/ its blue always shifting like the sky/ nothing is permanent.’ (‘Traveller’). This acknowledgment is balanced by a sense of spiritual immanence – God within specific times and places – in ‘My God’.

Although the poems are ostensibly simple in language and layout, there is a subtle craft at work with use of repetition and refrain playing against more straightforward lyric, in ‘Overgrown Garden’ and ‘White Mountain’ for example. At their best, these poems are ‘corridors’ like the subterranean passages left by earthworms in ‘Earthworms’; lines of connection – fragile, intricate, but enduring, and things of surprising beauty in themselves. As poets should, Corcos nudges his readers to see things afresh: different ways of being and of seeing are the thematic refrain of the poems. In the rich stillness of ‘The Long Summer’, ‘the fish look like birds covered in mirrors’, a memorable image that invites the reader to participate in poetic reflection and a re-envisioning of the natural world.

(Sarah Law)

Inuit Figure

bear’s head
glance cast back
across the shoulder

stance of a minotaur
heft to break down doors
to split pack ice on Arctic shores

the mask behind
bare vertebrae,
textures of grey-dappled stone,

suggest the shaman, known
to have powers of seeing
his own skeleton

a raven circles
dark among cypress
sun falls on copper lattice

burnishing patina
prayers are unlocked
from winter walls

after ‘Bear in shamanic transformation’ David Ruben Piqtoukan
ca. 1991. De Young Collection, San Francisco

Tony Lucas lives in London, south of the river. His most recent collection, Unsettled Accounts, was published by Stairwell Books.   Now retired from the Anglican ministry, his poetry has appeared on both sides of the Atlantic.   He is currently working on a sequence of poems about being in the ‘here and now’, which may appear toward the end of the year.

The Breathing of Glass

Blown
I take the straw and molten ball to my lips, reverent
in pause. Knowingly, I take the air in, and breathe.
I blow. The molten ball willingly accepts me, growing only
to the touch of my breath,
gentle, this moment of conception.

Etched
Taking the birthed glass, carefully I carve my story into
its body,
words and pictures from my mind precise,
accepted eagerly, sharing our message,
becoming the glass.

Stained
I gather pieces and remnants of glass,
brushing on the colors of me,
each piece shading and reflecting, painting the scene of my heart.
Pieces puzzling together, each selected and placed,
creating our whole and art.

Scratched
Using my glass, my life and movements leave
marks upon my glass,
no longer clean and clear. I mar.
Scratching upon the glass, my impression,
leaving this residue of me.

Cracked
I am not careful,
leaving it precarious.
And in my carelessness,
my glass
cracks.

Broken
Foolishly or intentionally, I toss or drop my glass. Shattering
our breath, our words, our colors, a pile of mismatched shards
to be swept up and tossed.

There is no glue for glass.
And the floor gasps.

Heather M. Browne is a faith-based psychotherapist, recently nominated for the Pushcart Award, published in the Orange Room, Boston Literary Review, Page & Spine, Eunoia Review, Poetry Quarterly, Red Fez, Electric Windmill, Apeiron, The Lake, Knot, mad swirl.  Red Dashboard   published two collections: Directions of Folding and Altar Call of Trumpets.  www.thehealedheart.net

Light And Dark

I want to measure the distance
between light and dark
between grains of sand

because it’s never enough
to simply have faith.
Pale and weary

I have taken myself apart
so many times
and cannot understand

this weakness of forgetting
that no alchemy can change.
Some memories are empty injuries

Both light and dark
are reminders of what I am
the anatomy of my existence