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Sanctuaries

At some point the landscape was not enough,
or it was so necessary that we
were prompted to respond with our own hands:

boundary of stream and pool, frame of mountain
and forest, horizon of lake and plain.
And so, in a place to see it all best,

dig a ditch to enclose and to widen out,
post and wall and a roof over the central pit,
offerings as much to the underground

as to the wide sky and the deep valley.
Hang old weapons from the entrance, from the walls,
shields of rotting wood and leather, and swords

all broken and rusted, bent and dismantled –
even the embalmed heads of enemies,
and even the heads of offered cattle

become corroded skulls up in the corner.
What we erected had to rhyme with the land,
even though our clutter of offerings

and objects could never match the simplest
grove or lakeside, plateau or hollow or
the wordless, most unassembled spread of oak.

But we did our best with gold offerings
and the feast, with wine drunk and ritually spilled,
with every tribal action preceded

by some gift and question about the land,
about another war or more travel.
What we made by ourselves was a reminder

of our own bewilderment and ignorance
but also of the clues left us, the love,
the seasons and their mighty moods, the land

and its inclinations, the animals
and their whims and tempers and emotions.
Knowledge makes none of this any easier,

but meaning is meaning for being hard.

Tim Miller writes about religion, history and poetry at www.wordandsilence.com. This poem is one from a larger collection on (mostly spiritual) life in prehistoric Europe, the entirety of which will appear later this year from The High Window Press. Other poems from this collection have appeared in Crannog, Londongrip, The High Window, Poethead, Cider Press Review, Cumberland River Review, Isacoustic, The Big Windows Review, The Basil O’Flaherty, Albatross, The Journal (Wales), and others.

Where Grace Is

In the gold case.
Behind drapes and gilded gates.
Under feathers and flames.
In the orange-jumpsuit-clad trapped in cages or inside broken minds.
In the swell of milk-drop on a mother’s breast.
In ash and grease and sweat.
In the rise of sun and compassion.
In cafés sipping coffee over dreams.
In the abandon of trust and deceit.
In the brush of whiskered breath or jet engines.
In cloudy film on corneas and lakes.
In the wasting of potential and organic things.
Where technology without faith makes light.
Where metal blades extract or access what is vital.
In music from a string, vibrating, or the night.
In the reach of men in palaces and underhulls of ships.
In soldiers armed with swords or righteousness.
In children, rocked in sleep or naked bottoms squatted over gutters in the street,
In the reflections of you and me as chance and morning traffic pass us by.
In the string of drool or thought from midday nap or hunger.
In the fury of infirmity or flight.
In the fathomless black of pupiled-eyes, the opaque liquid of their cup reflecting.
In the curl of smoke from thurible or cigarette.
In fingers twitching on triggers or lover’s flesh.
In unlit littered alleys and satin-sheeted beds.
In the passion of arms outstretched in lust or rigor mortis.
In the innocence of skin unblemished or shrapnel-shredded.
In temples, framed by hands in prayer or wielding whips, made of matter
Shaped with reverence and built or broken with a purpose.
Where mobs and lonely teem within a space, trapped and held in place
Like tea leaves in a bowl, cupped close and agitated.
In oil thick with musky scent or color painted on a canvas or a newborn baby’s head.
In fields of concrete boxes under stones,
In all we do and do not reap from what is sown.
Where prayer is necessary or forbidden.
Where grain transforms to flesh when fed to beasts
Who seek salvation or to live another day.
In the hammering of rain and sacrifice.
In the too-sweet press of lilies opened and forgiveness.
In the blue of noon and in acceptance.
In tumors or wombs where cells attach and multiply.
In the struggle of first breath and surrender.
In mercy and irreverence.
In words that weave into belief
Nothing.
In denial of randomness.
In the throats of those who thirst for that extracted of what’s fallen
But still blessed, sanctified and pressed to life again.
In the twisted limbs and minds and roots of men.
In kingdoms lit with fires long ago burned out.
In Hope
When we gaze up at this glow,
The place that fills the space of all the things we do not know
But seek.

Carrie Danaher Hoyt is a life-long lover and writer of poetry. Carrie lives in Massachusetts where she is a wife and mother of three school-aged kids. To pay the bills (as her poems don’t yet do this) she works as an estate planning attorney. Carrie has poems at twitterization.wordpress.com and cabinetofheed.wordpress.com

And Then

And then there are days
when the air is so mild,
the current so gentle,
it holds you, benevolent,
like a lover’s hand on your back,
a child’s trusting grasp.

It holds
the birthday candles,
the IV drip,
the pink slip,
the rogue cells,
the unmade bed,
the blackened eye.

It holds.
In this still moving,
everything is held.
It is weather, and more than weather.
And it is very good.

Jennifer Davis Michael is Professor and Chair of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mezzo Cammin, Southern Poetry Review, Literary Mama, Switchgrass Review, and Cumberland River Review.

The Fractals of the Cathkin Braes

Tragically persistent, the
work of beauty
flawed on purpose,
like these city views, subscribing
to bastardisations, space and time in a devious mind.
Neither victim nor perpetrator, where dark is sweet
and light grows bitter there is nothing else
that needs reversed, before the iron ravens
and the sparrows of steel, my vision of ice
does not turn to heat, the traffic moves
unperturbed by distance, the commuters forget
what they’ve learned of death, be a moon in water
or a sea on fire, and the metal faces of leviathans
become like milk, rippling, curdling, towards their margins.

The machines shall thrive, alive in their deadness
The dead only speak to the dead, this is why we envy them.
Sometimes there are no other shapes but circles
And when within them we recall who we are. Glasgow a book
with torn out pages fluttering in purgatorial wind,
its half-words and letters floating, onto sycophantic laps, dancing
before a flotilla of eyes unable
to transmit or receive, but are self-containing
to the point of implosion, craving
gourmet oblivion.

And the fractals of the Cathkin Braes
seek to signal their own narcoleptic shadows, sheets where ghosts
have no other option but to choose to remain there
No word once written erased completely,
this is the law no human hand could enforce. Linger the architectural
transcriptions of a universe whose planets
only appear to collide
but in fact move through each other
like water moves through water.
Artifice concedes to artifice as flesh concedes to flesh.
The electric becomes the electric.

Spirit Down to Bone

Steeped in family faith, receptive to the holy, I witnessed my first miracle as I played beside my bed one day. The corpus of the pink plastic phosphorescent crucifix fascinated, glowed green at night, and when held under the dust ruffle. It jumped away from me. Awestruck, I called to Mom, “It moved itself! My cross!” She expressed no doubt.

*

A visit with Dad to his Irish-born Great Aunt Kate at her New York convent nursing home room yielded more keepsakes. Withered, feeble fingers groped in the nightstand for holy cards, miraculous medals and black rosary beads. Nothing of value to bequeath but tokens of faith that passed from her ancient hands to mine. I kept her treasures in a shoebox with other religious articles; plastic glow-in-the-dark manger scene, the pink crucifix, my first communion prayer book, and took the box from my bookcase to inventory, perhaps test their power to move me, or move themselves.

Mary Ellen Gambutti’s stories appear or are forthcoming in Gravel Magazine, Wildflower Muse, The Remembered Arts Journal, The Vignette Review, Modern Creative Life, A Thousand and One Stories, Halcyon Days, Nature Writing, Post Card Shorts, Memoir Magazine, Haibun Today, and Borrowed Solace. https://ibisandhibiscusmelwrites.blogspot.com/

Morning High Above Bordeaux
I look down from on high
at Bordeaux every morning
or rather it looks down
from above my desk at me.
The postcard bought
when we flew over
is now my daily matins for you.

A prayer of the eyes,
lifted briefly from private thought
to where you’ve gone to roost
in a fusty attic in the russet roofs,
near the green pool of a municipal garden
and the twin-spired cathedral;
my hands to heaven.

Paul Bregazzi’s poetry has appeared widely in print and on-line in Ireland, the U.K., France, Mexico and the U.S. His work has been shortlisted and awarded in numerous competitions in Europe and the U.S., including the Bridport Prize. He was Cuirt New Writer of the Year 2017.

Pruning the Thorn Child

for Jane and Katie

Handle everything with open hands,
showing warmth.
Spread your fingers apart
the thorns will rest between them.

Grasp slowly.
Trim small.
What you cut cannot be undone
So train your eyes to feel.

Pull quietly, without fuss, eyes averted;
the Osage is easily embarrassed.
……….Leave the bird’s nest there:
……….wonder and beauty and surprise
……….are required in every thorn child.
……….This is why we plant them.

Cut everything that crosses,
Everything you can reach.
What you can’t reach, commend to God.

Those branches, even tangled,
will reach the sky anyway
stretching to the light,
towards God,
towards flight
thorns and all,
every one.

Jenny Jordan grew up in Liberia, fleeing the approaching civil war with her family in 1990. She now lives in Wisconsin with her husband and teen daughter. She has a formal degree in architecture and an informal one in parenting an unusual child. She blogs at anewelephant.wordpress.com 

Light Hearted

the molecules of glass match the frequencies of light
which is why we have windows and not dense dim
rectangles of other matter to look through darkly

and how we can see while still indoors the grass and green
leaves of gardens, when we go outside we see the same
but unframed larger wider views of plane trailed skies

and when our eyes, in love with light, become windows
we also are framers of all clear sight, feeling that
lightness larger even than dimension

brimming over from its darkness into form
light-hearted then we no longer take ourselves too
seriously seeing that light always makes us lighter.
 

Barn Owl Over the Levels

I saw her once, flying towards me.
Her pale, heart-shaped face
wearing my dark eyes.

Barn owl stalks the liminal edge
water and light deepening to violet;
her talons will take heartbeats
in white silence; as much as she needs
from the visible dark that swells around
like the sea. Some nights, the levels
are thick with saltflecks of stars
and she is the moon’s flying woman,
cloaking light over her deadly wings.

I would be luminous then, walking
beside her on stilts, entering the marsh
through the night gate above the water,
trailing my sharp net, certain to find you.

© Rose Flint

Rose Flint has worked as a creative writing tutor and was for 10 years Writer in Residence at Salisbury District Hospital, working in all areas of healthcare. She has five collections, including A Prism for the Sun (Oversteps). Awards include the Cardiff Poetry Prize and the Petra Kenney International Prize.

The Existence of Things Inside Wall Spaces

……..What exists in the gap between bricks? The gap where the mortar has crumbled away as aggregates of time. I have to know. I have to know, like the Canadian geese have to know the way back from Ireland in the
spring. I have to look.
……..I’m looking. Not into the interior of a house, but into a small hole. Inside the hole is a miniature spinning wheel, not more than an inch big, and beside it, a pair of silk mittens, like mocha-colored oven gloves. They seem to have a ferrous tinge from the orange brick. As my eyes scour the space, I see mocha-colored silk threads zigzagging their way from upper to lower facets of brick.
……..Where I’m looking, a chunk of plaster is missing from the wall, as if someone spent a good deal of time carefully peeling it away from the brick. I’m guessing it was a bored child. A stuffy child, probably a spoiled kid with a pudgy face, and an ill demeanor.
……..Now, I too am peeling the plaster. The white flakes coming away in my hand are not more than half a centimeter thick and are leaving a powdery white residue on my palm and under my nails. Beneath, the brick is tangerine orange.
……..And what is this I see? A psychedelic greenish-blue blob about two inches long. I extend my finger to investigate.
……..It moves! A caterpillar: plump and feisty, living under the plaster. How on earth did such a juicy fellow fit under that packed space?
……..The caterpillar makes its way along the crease of the brick towards the gap. Oh no. No you don’t! No quick escape for you when I’m in such an inquisitive mood!
……..The thing wriggles and, afraid it might drop, I encourage it onto my hand. My, oh my, what sticky legs it has; I needn’t have worried in the first place.
……..Did this little beastie spin the silk threads? This squishy critter knitting tiny oven gloves at the minute spinning wheel, and who knows what other things that fill the space between bricks? Oh, the things Canadian geese would only know if they looked below on their journey!
……..I’m glad I wasn’t inclined to transcend that gap. How easy it could have been to not look inside. When you’re en-route from A to B, a straight line is the quickest way. Not to mention the least complicated. I’d like to say it was coincidence, but I’m not so sure. If you bother to look inside a world, there’s another smaller world
tucked inside it.
……..Blue-green caterpillars only happen on a crescent moon. When the sky is a backwash of clouds swept away by a tide of silken thread. Sometimes, if you focus too much on the path to the moon, you might miss all the heavenly glory.