Amethyst Review

   A City Church

Here you may bathe in silence,
The thud of traffic on the road wiped out
By eternity.
Here stones breathe out
The softened breath of centuries.
Here men have worked,
Patiently coaxing worlds from wood and stone
To make creation new.

Here, each strike of chisel, chip of wood,
Has fed a quest for the divine.
Here the vaults oar towards a distant heaven,
Carvings unseen are carefully teased out,
Made perfect, not for sight of men,
But for the eye of God.

Rough craftsmen, hardened by a bitter world
Brought life from stone,
Pictures of those in power, long despised,
Making their noses long, their chins too big.
Carpenters made the dark wood bloom
To fill an aching void.
Here monkeys and grotesques,
Pigs running, pipes blaring, 
Angels, lute-playing, wives beating,
Elephants trumpeting, lions roaring,
Ploughmen who turn the sodden land
And women gleaning after harvest.

Here velvet rose flowers and the lily blooms,
Vines twist abundant, gentle Mary smiles,
Green men are peeping from the tangled woods
To watch good souls go climbing up to heaven.
Here pig and rose, the pipes and lilies,
Today and yesterday, what is to come, 
All sing as one, creator’s bounty
Under an arc of grace.

Helen Jones gained a degree in English, many years ago from University College London and later an M.Ed. from the University of Liverpool. She is now happily retired and spends a lot of her time writing and making a new garden. 

Springtime Meditation

On this spring afternoon,
There’s a wind from the northeast.
That in its dampness
Almost carries the scent of the sea.
And the just-budding apple trees
Stretch crooked limbs upward,
Asking for the heaven’s warmth –
Or are those outstretched limbs
Admonitory; pointing to the sky
To remind us that the heavens
Which reach the earth
And fill us with life,
As in the nascent buds
On those nearly barren branches,
Might just as easily
Rain down ice
Or unmerciful sun?

Joseph Kleponis lives north of Boston, Massachusetts. His poetry has been appeared in Boston Literary Magazine, Eucalypt, First Literary Review -East, Penmen Review of Southern New Hampshire University, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Wilderness House Literary Review. Truth’s Truth, his first book, was released in 2021 by Kelsay Books.

Kinnikinnick 

The low shrub you know as bearberry
also bears the castanet name kinnikinnick
scientific moniker of Arctostaphylos
uva-ursi    Beloved by bears and hummingbirds   
it thrives in bright sun and poor soil   
makes the best of things

Do not be confused by the fact it has
different names. Don’t you? 
Don’t you have multiple ways of being 
in the world depending on the day   the year 
who you’re with and where?

In the mishmash of thoughts   experiences   
hopes   regrets – all the stuff of “being human” 
we live not one life but many   have multiple 
transformations like instars of a Cecropia 
changing shape   colors   crawling   spinning
finally flying   We morph and what the world sees 
looks different

But how altered is what lies within? 
Some will say I’ve always been this way 
but others of us know we’ve been reworked
fibers unwound   restrung to play a different tune
rough edges painfully ground down 
glowing now with rich patina

Our facets   cracks and divots are unique
have their own inimitable splendor
kinnikinnick’s small pink 
vase-shaped summer flowers   
autumn’s scarlet berries
 

Sylvia Byrne Pollack’s poems appear in Floating Bridge Review, Crab Creek Review, The Stillwater Review and many others. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, 2013 Mason’s Road Literary Awardee, 2019 Jack Straw Writer, 2021 Mineral School Resident. Her debut collection is Risking It (Red Mountain Press 2021.) www.sylviabyrnepollack.com

Gnosis


Let the ocean enter you,
let the rush of saline silence fill the dark cavern 
cluttered with detritus,
with your collection of broken thoughts, 
obsessions and addictions piled like idols.

Awash, submerged, and sunken -
observe their frailty.

Waters deeper than you knew 
settle into glassy reflection.
All open, receiving, all palms thankful,
ears fanned like conch shells. 

This mirror birthed in briny wash
and reverence -
gaze there to see the mystery.

Erin Olson is a licensed professional counselor living in southeastern Wisconsin. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Neologism Poetry Journal, Last Leaves Magazine, and Sky Island Journal. 

Jacob’s Angel

And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. 
And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

Genesis 32:26 (KJV)


The herder Jacob, gripped by guilt and fear,
has wrestled with a stranger all the night
when in the borderlands of dawn he hears
his foe entreat to end the fight.

I will not let you go, the herder cries,			
unless you bless me! Then awakening
from sweat-soaked sleep he rubs his aching thigh
and hears an echo from the fading dream:

From now you shall be known as Israel! 
And as he limps into the breaking day,
while meditating on this nameless angel’s
benediction, Jacob asks if he

had just contended with his God or if
the mystery angel might have been himself.

James Green is a retired university professor and administrator.  He has published five chapbooks of poetry and individual poems have appeared in literary journals in Ireland, the UK, and the USA. His collection, Stations of the Cross, was nominated for the MLA’s Conference on Christianity and Literature Book of the Year. His website can be found at http://www.jamesgreenpoetry.net.

Illuminated Manuscript
 

I am the flourish,
Not the trumpet,
 
Yet I am at least
Ornamental,
 
If not instrumental,
To the prophecy—
 
Come to think of it,
I am in the same
 
Position as God the
Father, always
 
Sky, not the sun, neither
The accumulating
 
Nor dispersing clouds.
But I am a handful
 
Of colors (available to men 
In the medieval period), the
 
Revelation
Incomplete without
 
The whole sum
Of foreground, middle ground,
 
And back, animate
And invisible musics,
 
And the spirit of
It,
 
Coursing through it all.

Marion Evalee (they/she), formerly Justin Burnett, has appeared in Montage, Survivor Lit, The Boston Compass, Neologism, and Willows Wept Review. A selection of their poetry was featured in the anthology 14 International Younger Poets, edited by Philip Nikolayev.

God is Spirt is Wisdom

Elder Gideon is the author of two poetry collections Gnostic Triptych and Aegis of Waves (Atmosphere Press) and co-author with Tau Malachi of Gnosis of Guadalupe (EPS Press, 2017). His poems and sculptures have appeared in dozens of journals. 

Siddhattha Rewrites “O Store Gud” 

Let us not worship sadness for the aim of great art; 
I say, let us worship art, for the sake of great sadness.

Bow your head and pray, without the content of your words. 
Pray with your knees, pray with your slumped shoulders, 
pray with your chin set, in the basket of your clavicle. 

A buddha might sit 
in a blade of grass, in a bowl of water, 
along a fly’s hum, on a weathered stone

but no buddha has ever nor will ever be housed in your form. 
There is no enlightenment for you, for are you not 
            unsure?

We may yearn for what we’ve forgotten. 
Never was there safety or simplicity within the womb you might long for. 
How many ways you could have died, how many sufferings you did endure.

My god is the God of General Sadness. 

No god requires you to believe, for holy places be dark places. 
No gospel was ever meant to be written down, 
spoken aloud, agonized over, 
kept, cradled dearly.

So draw the face of your god. 
Paint the trappings of the next, the nothing, 
the end, the beginning you have never known.

You have been given no soul that is whole. Rather, you are building it. 
            I say, you must labor, you must pain over it.

When you ascend, or sink, or dissolve, or join, 
will you be a being? Will you be whole?

När brister själen (When the soul breaks)
ut i lofsångsljud, (and the hymns sound,)

            let us be as great art. 

Let us in finality be hung on the walls. 
Ourselves, at last, surrendering.

Renwick Berchild is half literary critic, half poet. She is lead editor of Green Lion Journal and writes at Nothing in Particular Book Review. Her poems have appeared in Porridge Magazine, AIOTB, Headline Press, Whimperbang, Free Verse Revolution, Vita Brevis, Streetcake, and other e-zines, anthologies, and journals. She was born and raised on the angry shores of Lake Superior, and now lives in a micro-apartment in Seattle, WA. Find more of her work at www.renwickberchild.com

Mary Magdalen Seated Before a Mirror

After Georges de La Tour, Penitent Magdalen, 1640



                        1.

Beneath the wood 
ran lines of water,
cutting across the root.

The wood had rotted;
it broke off in her hand,
splintery like a clod of earth,
crawling, and beneath her hand
the sharp running blades –
her dry, soundless weeping,
her solitude.


                        2.

She knew that she had fallen:
the cold descent 
a jewel of knowledge 
placed upon her.

Close by was the little dresser
with its oval glass, oblique,
discreet in dust – 
unwilling to embarrass her.

The dresser in a child’s size;
she had to fold herself up to be near it,
to trace with her finger the oval,
the old view.  The first.

She placed her fingers on the surface:
here; here.
She bent forward, turned her head
to the sliding impossible image,
the eyelash, the whole, the furnished room:
now it is there.

                        3.

To her flesh was laid the edge of the knife,
division of eternity.

The skin was lifted away.
Veils fluttered,
unresisting the edge that caught, lifted,
found easily the quick fraying,
the edge everywhere at once,
the separation at first schematic
along the warp and the weft,
then from each point
equal motion in all directions was possible,
all outwards,
the veil lifted: torn, adrift, smoke.

The muscles of the body lay exposed,
bound in curving sheaves,
braided into one another at the narrow end;
the sheaves of the reed boat journeying,
at every point at the crossing
of descending lunar spears,
and the horizontal breaking 
of silver multitudes
of blades cutting the water.

Braided around the globe of the eye,
the cavity of the mouth,
locked fingers of the open hand,
down the neck, across the shoulders,
the breast, the belly, the arms
and the thighs and the lower legs,
all the limbs and parts,
locked fingers drawn tight,
then loosening, 
rising to curve,
then drawn, twisted tight, 
drawn down.

What word, what step,
what composed and thoughtful gesture
was possible,
drawn from the locked knot of fingers
blind, groping to open and close, 
unclenched, mute?

And the slashed triangle,
slashed like the backbone of a fish,
slashed like the locked, interwoven edges
of the sheaf?

                          4.

To the veil, the reed boat, the sheaf,
from the mirror, the water, the wood,
a candle approached,
as flame, and light.

Cynthia Sowers was a Senior Lecturer at the Residential College of the University of Michigan. Until her retirement in 2019, she developed and taught interdisciplinary courses for the Arts and Ideas in the Humanities Program. Her past teaching and current creative activity are centered on the engagement of literature and the visual arts.  She has published poetry, drawings and paintings in The Solum Journal (2020; 2021) and poetry in Amethyst Review (2021).  She has published a short story, “A Trap to Catch the Earth,” in The Carolina Quarterly (Spring/Summer 2021).

Jacob

The night I fled my father and brother
I came to a certain place at sundown.
I used a stone for my pillow and shelter
and while I slept the curtain of the sky
was lifted and I saw steps climbing up
to heaven and a face carved out of fire
fashioning a Temple. And my face glowed
from God and the angels of God who stood
over me, and I blessed the place when I woke,
the place where the future was folded up
and put beneath my head as a pillow.
And God’s voice and God’s visions pursued me,
they rattled like the fruit and leaves of the
almond tree, and peace were not on those lips.

The night before I met my brother again
I was alone with someone at that river,
and we wrestled through our strength on the ground
and we rose up to heaven and continued
to scuffle there, until both our bodies
glowed and he wrenched my leg into a limp,
and adorned me with a new name – Israel.
And he did not tell me I would find peace,
he did not say there would simply be love,
he did not simply say “sons and daughters,”
but he did say, “You will always see the
morning others hoped to keep from you.
Your stubbornness will never cease, your words,
your families, no more than this blue river.”

I was marked by all my family’s stories
I was marked by this wrestler in God’s skin
I was marked by what God did to my body,
making it whole with injury and strangeness.
I will die with sons and grandsons around me
and all of Egypt will be led beyond
the Jordan to mourn my body’s return
to those who made pilgrimage before me.
My years have been bright in enormous struggle,
in vivid love, injustice, and mercy.
Let the world worship every obvious
power and glory, and leave me alone
with silence and exile, the gathering
of my sparks, with God’s slow accumulation.

Tim Miller‘s books include the poetry collection Bone Antler Stone (High Window Press), and the long narrative poem, To the House of the Sun (S4N Books). He is online at wordandsilence.com, and can be heard on the poetry and mythology podcast Human Voices Wake Us.