Amethyst Review

Missionaries


They sail to places where their congregations
have never seen a map to plant churches
in jungles, deserts, in rainforests, in countries
not easily reached, and sometimes closed.

Watches or clocks are useless in many 
of these places; time is measured in dreams 
or when animals migrate. Ants or water buffalo
can be the timekeepers. Or molting alligators.

To communicate with their new flock
they must learn to make sounds their ears
have never heard or eyes seen. They teach
catechumens to recite God's name 

in different dialects without alphabets.
They sing in harmony with shafts
of sunlight; no high sopranos here;
toucans, hornbills, parrots make up the chorus.

They carry rainbows in their Bibles and build
ambries decorated with plantain leaves and
raise special praying bees for sanctuaries.
They use mists and moss to teach Gospel lessons.

The know God's gathering places and where
to hunker down when storms, earth slides, or
floods try to overcome their will to believe.
They inscribe epitaphs on bamboo tombstones.

Philip Kolin is the Distinguished Professor of English (Emeritus) and Editor Emeritus of the Southern Quarterly at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published over 40 books, including twelve collections  of poetry and chapbooks. Among his most recent titles are Emmett Till in Different States (Third World Press, 2015), Reaching Forever (Poiema Series, Cascade Books, 2019), Delta Tears (Main Street Rag, 2020), Wholly God’s: Poems (Wind and Water Press, 2021), and Americorona: Poems about the Pandemic (Wipf and Stock, 2021).

Shelter

All day, the rain has been plinking,
plunking, finally pelting down.
The whole time, latched to a slat
on the back of a bench outside
my kitchen window, a praying mantis.
Like a wooden clothespin with electric-green
limbs, not praying but splayed, tiny guy
wires that wrap and cling. Invertebrate
body looking like the offspring
of a pterodactyl tamped into the cast
of a clasped pocketknife. Still as a stick. If this
were me, I would fan my wings and flail
at the wet. Check and re-check the weather
on my phone. At the very least wail
about the lack of a cup of hot tea. But no.
Here’s a slim Zen priest, head bowed beneath
the lip of the rickety seat’s top rail. Just clearing
fat raindrops, poised to plop into the abyss.
Alert, as the sutras teach. At ease.

Paige Gilchrist lives in Asheville, NC, where she writes poetry and teaches yoga. Her poems have appeared in Kakalak, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, and The Great Smokies Review.

Annie Diamond is an Ashkenazi Jewish poet living and working in Chicago. She has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell, Luminarts Cultural Foundation, The Lighthouse Works, and Boston University, where she earned her MFA in 2017. Her poems appear and are forthcoming in No Tokens, Yemassee, Modern Language Studies, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere.

Smart Water-Bottle Prayer

Let clouds inspire me once again
as I slump here, empty and tangled 
in kelp. Make me raindrop pure. Lift 

me out of this seaweed sump, this 
toxic syrup where jellyfish spread nets
and no-one lays down a beach towel.

May clean hands re-energise me.
Deliver me from wrack of reef 
and rock and reek of fishbone tide. 

Lead me not into whale belly,
raw crack or wince of saline sting. 
Unfurl a banner over me, 

string balloons to wave and sing airs, 
spangle me in gold sand dollars. 
Replenish, re-use, re-muse me.

Helen Freeman started writing poetry whilst recovering from an accident in Oman and got hooked.  She now lives in Durham, England and has poems published on sites like Visual Verse, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Clear Poetry, Ground Poetry, Open Mouse, Algebra of Owls, Red River Review, Barren Magazine, The Drabble, Sukoon, Poems for Ephesians and Ekphrastic Review.  Instagram @chemchemi.hf 

Now, and at The Hour of Our Death

a Marian prayer with ladybugs


Lady-birds—mothers of Christ—autumn seekers
of heat and quiet; you return to me in multitudes.

You gather for days in high corners of my room, 
black spots like tiny sins on your blood-red capes.

Then, O’ delight! You bless me in my shower stall!
Stigmata of my bathroom wall, please pray for us! 

When ghosts of steam condense, and holy water 
streams, consider me when you pause to drink.

Lesley-Anne Evans, an Irish-Canadian poet, writes from Feeny Wood, a contemplative woodland retreat in Kelowna, B.C., on the traditional unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Antigonish Review, Letters Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Contemporary Verse 2, The Catholic Poetry Room, Soul Lit, and other periodicals. Lesley-Anne’s debut poetry collection, Mute Swan, Poems for Maria Queen of the World, was published by The St. Thomas Poetry Series (Toronto) in 2021. 

Rabbi Nehorai to Acher
 
In Heaven, I have heard, there is no sitting
down, or telling jokes, or shedding tears—
one life’s allotment lasts one all his years,
then ducts run dry, mirth fades, prayer unremitting
serves for an eternity or so.
In Abram’s bosom, “Ha!” has been erased,
desire and hate—such joys!—from the soul effaced.
We must partake of these before we go.
I’ve always hoped there will be time for study,
that one might pass the long celestial season
among the learned dead, debate the twists
of the Law that, like blind pathways, seemed so muddy
to mortal eyes, to finally clear the mists,
and the final joy will rise from faith and reason.

Note: One of Rabbi Meir’s closest friends was the ostracized heretic Acher (“The Other”), with whom he would frequently debate scripture even as it risked his reputation to do so. Acher’s heresy may have sprung from a vision of a seated angel, contradicting the teaching that in Heaven there is no sitting down, as there is no weariness.

Daniel Galef‘s first book, Imaginary Sonnets (2023), is a collection of seventy persona poems, each a verse monologue exploring the point of view of a different historical figure, literary character, or inanimate object. Subjects include Saint Augustine, the moral philosopher John Taurek, and the woman who painted the fresco of Christ in Borja, Spain. The book is available now from Word Galaxy/Able Muse Press.

The Darkness

 
Darkness has never been my enemy.
Whatever the night could bring, the dark
Was solid, sure and safe. Four o’clock light
Is a deception, and four o’clock dusk
A temporary blip. We get it right,
The balance, only twice a year, if that.
 
These days, at nightfall, I welcome in the dark,
Wrap its sure and silent fabric round me, let it
Billow out behind me, my dark cape.
I stroke its velvet, finger its folds, take comfort
From its blanketing embrace. I feel no loss
When light fades its dimmer into twilight, and clicks off.
 
I have faith in darkness, in knowing that I don’t know
What I don’t know. What is there is all that light can show.

Edward Alport is a retired teacher and proud Essex Boy. He occupies his time as a poet, gardener and writer for children. He has had poetry, stories and articles published in a variety of webzines and magazines and BBC Radio. He sometimes posts snarky micropoems on Twitter as @cross_mouse.

A Monk's Burial

We see on the ice plains,
the snow on brittle stubble.
From the white lake
fishermen leave the shacks
to watch the slow line
of mourners -- singling
up to the holy ground
broken open, like the holes
for ice fishing
in the deep, flat water.
The pile of sandy dirt
seems to cover
the broken backbone
of an ancient whale.
Each of us, with a hand full
of soil or line
is drawn down now
into the silence.

Royal Rhodes taught the history of Christianity for almost forty years. His poems have appeared in a number of literary journals, including: Ekstasis Poetry, Amethyst Magazine, Foreshadow Magazine, The Cafe Review, New Verse News, and  STAR 82 Review, among others. Art and poetry collaborations have been published by The Catbird [on the Yadkin] Press in North Carolina.

The Mystic’s Autumn

We remind ourselves how we have more time
now that the backyard pool is covered and the leaves
are splotched with color; out the back window 
the neighbor’s maple is doused with red wine.

You cover yourself with my mother’s old blanket,
open the book of puzzles and get to work – the tip
of your dark yellow pencil is sharpened to a point.

The leaden sky revealed at sunrise is ominous,
reminding us that winter has risen from its long
sleep and pulls on its heavy, worn boots.

The furnace restarts with its long exhale
while the words of a favorite poet settle
into consciousness as if spoken directly from Rumi.

Rumi, ancient jester, how would you feel
if the dervish wind spoke through the maple’s branches
that slowly, slowly, shed their fancy suit of clothes?

Bruce Gunther is a former journalist and writer who lives in Bay City, Michigan. He’s a graduate of Central Michigan University. His poems have appeared in Arc Magazine, the Comstock Review, the Dunes Review, Modern Haiku, and others.

Lasciate ogne speranza

I would abandon all hope, but recall
that Dante Alighieri took his tour
in stride and, though he saw things that appall,
showed what a dauntless spirit can endure.
So even in a throng of souls impure,
or deemed so by a scribe who with his pen
enlisted them among the damned, a sure
foot in a stout shoe might emerge again
from Hell’s own rankest river, ring, and den.
So here we are, my friend, in deepest wood,
strange eyes fixed on us since we don’t know when,
and choosing to be elsewhere if we could.
We will not tremble. Nor will we turn back,
nor credit the injunction on the plaque.
 

Dan Campion‘s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). A selection of his poems was issued by the Ice Cube Press in July 2022: https://icecubepress.com/2021/10/01/a-playbill-for-sunset/