Amethyst Review

Watch
 
Maundy Thursday, ten o’clock
the lamps along the church path
supplemented by a full moon
 
shining through trellised branches
of an unleafed sycamore.
Red warning lights on cranes,
 
massed about sites across the river
glowing in velvet darkness
add to an air of quiet waiting.
 
Back in the space where altars
have been stripped, a few
will keep the seasonal vigil
 
for a further silent hour.
Out here it is as if there were
a holding-in of breath
 
–  everything feels gathered
somehow attentive, for
one lingering moment, then
 
a late bus, lighted, empty,
busies around the corner
and the city’s pulse resumes.

Tony Lucas is retired from parish ministry but continues work of editing and spiritual direction.  His poetry has appeared widely, on both sides of the Atlantic, and past collections Rufus At Ocean Beach (Stride/Carmelyon) and Unsettled Accounts (Stairwell Books) remain available.

Seedbed


We don’t dig up the planted seed
to check if it is germinate;
we forswear checking on its gain,
predicting time it might emerge.
We can only cultivate 
the right conditions, water, light,
that it might thrive, though secretly.
It is that private, silent growth,
that calls to mind annunciate,
or, when time right, epiphany.
For that’s the revelation scene
as garland roots by diamond drops
and minerals have proved their salt,
the sunbed warmth has cossetted
and humous life is resurrect.
Each seed, an Easter garden wait.

Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales from ministry in the Methodist Church due to Parkinson’s Disease, has had pieces published by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including Amethyst Review. His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com/ He is, like so many, a nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net this year.   

Sacred Song

I am totally caught up in the music on my radio:
songs sung by a choir, mesmeric and ghostly, 
hallowed even, this close to midnight.

The announcer says it is Holy Week, 
but my daughter complains it is 'not very nice'. 
It is time to surrender, turn off and go to sleep.

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)

Bardo


Spare me the music

the thrill of waiting is enough

in some corner     dreaming

in a shadow     pulsing

the softness in a mare’s eye

moth skin and wing

bleating for love

the tick and tick arising

in each soul suspended

I walk with closed eyes

into the roar of dawn

Scott Elder lives in France. His work has mostly appeared in the UK and Ireland. A debut pamphlet, Breaking Away, was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2015, his first collection, Part of the Dark, by Dempsey&Windle 2017 (UK), and the second, My Hotel, is forthcoming in Salmon Poetry 2023 (Ireland).   Website: https://www.scottelder.co.uk/

The Sacred Self

I
There goes sleep, in its nightshirt
and slippers down the path
that never deviates from its one true
purpose of remembering. It doesn’t matter
that each call goes unanswered, that
the canyon opens to allow
anyone inside but
nobody may leave once the birds there
have befriended them. When a song
comes echoing along
the gravel trail, it is to announce the obvious
with men hearing only
what they want to hear. Meanwhile,
the eye in Heaven winks
and rock spirits
raise their voices to say this is here, this
is now. Never mind
what stays hidden behind the screens
and thorns; this is where
history comes awake
and speaks only in the present tense.
 
II
Barefoot down the slopes and wearing
heavy boots back up, the night
burrows into the mountain and twists
in its sleep while the earth with one eye open
dreams itself awake. Tonight
will stretch from end to end along
the stony path from sunset’s crumbling edge
to the saguaros standing guard against
the city; chilled to the core
and determined
to hold the high ground in the name
of nature. Solstice is a cold night
when owls awaken and follow
darkness’ scent while moonlight
snags on a thorn, and no image
survives of the claw
that cut the silence open.
 
III
The moon turns out its silver lining
at the darkest hour
the night can draw
from its catalog of mysteries and threats.
And while the mountain moves
ever closer to dawn
with its eyes shielded
the sky holds its breath. Along the ridgeline
first light signals time
returning to the slopes and the arroyos
where memories find
a quiet place to hide from what
they have done. They’re saddled up
and riding now, along
the wash to where they disappear
into the still pond that contains
all pain. Look hard along
the winding path: they’ve gone too far
to ever come back and be
recognized. To ever find
the scene of their creation.
 
IV
The water’s on its back but smiling
at the sky today, host
to winter’s folded wings. The walkway
leading here peels itself away
from the left sole and the right at the pace
of injuries healing. It’s that time
in the morning when
the mountain has surrendered
to the light, and the light has unsheathed itself
with no regrets. Up there
at the peak the view goes all the way
back to better times and worse
ones. They run together
in the clouds now: a splash of sunshine
and a red-tail rising
where memories fly against gravity.
 
V
The bird came down to drink
an ambulance’s siren from the air; it spread
its wings to shield
the scene from sunlight.
As often as it flew with nothing to invite
it to descend, one moment split
apart and everything that time revealed
lay spread out on
the morning’s road. It circled
patiently. Its plumage shone
as the broad wings tipped to left
and right and
held fate in the balance.
The clocks showed hours and minutes
but no signs
of what occurred. No memory
had come to roost
once the panic was dispersed.
Everybody left the scene
for traffic to resume, but in
the spaces in between the slow cars
and the fast, the bird came down with its
ungainly posture and red
face to clean
away the final traces. Then
it rose in a state of grace
toward the waiting sky.

David Chorlton is a European and longtime resident of Phoenix. He loves the desert and avoids complaining about the heat! He paints from time to time and writes consistently, with a short book, The Inner Mountain, about the nearby desert mountain park in poetry and paintings (Cholla Needles Press), with another recent publication, Unmapped Worlds from FutureCycle Press.

The Wise and Foolish Virgins


Grab a lamp. Off we go.
Here’s our secret:

We are all wise.
We go not to meet the bridegroom

but to avoid him altogether,
for a woman needs a man

like a fish needs a camel. 
We will talk among ourselves 

about the taste of wine, 
sharing the bottle, 

the price of oil, 
and the lamp that helps us see ahead

in the moonless dark.
We gather on the edge of the city

where we will not be followed
 by clownish men orating

scripture and sin. One day
we will outnumber them. 

Our laughter perfumes the desert,
and the dust from our sandals

will choke all predators
as we return to our rooms

and scribble our verses 
well past midnight.

Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, ParisLitUp, Meniscus, Agenda, Gradiva and other journals. Her most recent book of poetry is Edges.

Sestina for Seventy
 
Summoning grit to face this winter chore:
though I would rather sip hot tea, I’ll choose
the January wind and snow, divide
my comforts from a rougher, fiercer side—
so while the northwest wind hurls cold abuse,
determination thrusts me out the door.
 
Mom’s Puritan equation mandates use
of anything I scrape from plates. Her chore
carves virtue out of waste. And Dad’s divide
thrusts all forgiveness out the battered door,
responsibility the only grace he’d choose.
“Work more,” he’d growl, affection swept aside.
 
Bones from the night before are what I choose
as feast to carry past the wind-slammed door
and half across the icy field. My chore
will feed the tree-perched crows with scraps outside
where they delight in what I didn’t use
gorging on skin and fat. I will divide
 
my soul from past instructions, turn aside
the bitterness of past defeat. I’ll use
the sharp air of the storm as if the door
enabled me to frame my own divide,
hurling away what’s bitter—I can choose
to bear my blue amazement as no chore.
 
Be good, behave, be what my parents choose:
This route’s become a foolish, useless chore,
something that threatens to again divide
the joys I treasure, setting love aside
as if enjoyment had no higher use.
As if the rhyme were rope instead of door!
 
Then I declare, through wide-swung wind-blessed door,
let virtue topple loose. Why chafe with chore
when joy can be the wild storm that I choose,
its white amazement feathered for my use.
When every feather’s settled at my side
the warmth of new forgiveness will divide
 
the world that once my parents tried to choose
from one I’m building, word by word, outside:
oh grace of storm, inhaled; oh, open door. 

Beth Kanell lives in northeastern Vermont, with a mountain at her back and a river at her feet. She’s a published poet, novelist, historian, and memoirist, and shares her research and writing process at BethKanell.blogspot.com. 

What We Know, or Not


Through the mounds of drifted white
	a squirrel, perhaps, leaves its trail,
has leapt from hedge to tree
		then scrambled up the trunk
			to hang on a branch, or not,
daring itself to fall, then darts to sturdiness,
	sits with an acorn in near-human hands, 
		hunched like The Thinker before
			the downward scurry.	
Only conjecture.

Eons above, on a winter’s night, Orion
	searches for bits of stars that fell
		from his belt and became
			neutrinos or some-such
invisible particles. The glow of the Milky Way
	is lost in dark matter, which probably exists
		and could swallow everything whole at any moment,
			licking its lips, filling its dark belly
with nothingness. And through it all

the world keeps turning, stars keep spinning 
		in a cosmic sleight-of-hand, where
humans are pulled out of a hat like rabbits, or not,
		like a coin in the hand of a magician who tucks it 
	behind the ear of a child at a birthday party, when 
		tricks are applauded, tracks left
			on a snow-covered garden,
and we try to guess
		what is the truth.

Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, ParisLitUp, Meniscus, Agenda, Gradiva and other journals. Her most recent book of poetry is EDGES.

MaritaIn, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages


I see in you, poring and praying over images,
a charitable hermeneutic, art criticism 
as love of neighbour, that contemplation 
which alone reveals the true value of charity.
Careful attention paid to the particular work made, 
reception on that work’s own terms, naming the ways 
important human concerns – longings, laments, 
joys, failures, discontent – are active in the work 
and bear on you and me – us – today.
Giving yourself without reservation 
to all that demands your attention,
believing in the dignity of every 
natural activity, with which one knows 
through experience, integral humanism.
Throwing your heart into things like a dart 
or a rocket, seeing within the thing itself 
the flash of spiritual light where a glimpse of God 
shines out, a fleeting reality in which 
there flashes the slightest glimmer of love or beauty,
the call of love to which love alone responds, 
the invisceration of supernatural, boundless charity 
in the very exercise of poetic gift. A genuflection 
of thought in the presence of God; reason having 
warmth, movement, and generosity, just like the heart, 
reasoning that touches and moves 
when it begins in charity, 
intellectual charity.

(Based on: ‘Sister Wendy Beckett – A Reminiscence By Revd Jonathan Evens’, Artlyst, 2018; ‘Jonathan Anderson: Religious Inspirations Behind Modernism – Interview Revd Jonathan Evens’, Artlyst, 2018; and ‘The Story of Two Souls’, H. Bars & E. Jourdan ed, Fordham University Press, 1988)

Jonathan Evens is Associate Vicar for HeartEdge at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Through HeartEdge, a network of churches, he encourages congregations to engage with culture, compassion and commerce. He writes on the Arts for a range of publications including Artlyst, ArtWay and Church Times. He is co-author of ‘The Secret Chord,’ an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life written through the prism of Christian belief. He blogs at Between: https://joninbetween.blogspot.com/

After All This

The earth was without form and an empty waste, and darkness was upon the face of the very great deep. The Spirit of God was brooding over the face of the waters.
—Genesis 1:2


In the midst of miracles
At this moment of sand
	The definitions and philosophies of stone
	The separation of bones and dust
	Of air from eyes
	The architecture of lungs in creatures and the lungs of earth.

In a sky 
	A universe, stuffed full of everything
At the beginning of love
	Of oneness
Just one moment ago.

Filling, filling, filling,

Stars and void
Molecules and sound,
The everything hidden inside everything, part of everything,
Connected in one way or another to everything else. 
	Pretend
	People that do not look like you 
	Are not like you.

Marc Janssen lives in a house with a wife who likes him and a cat who loathes him. Regardless of that turmoil, his poetry can be found scattered around the world in places like Pinyon, Slant, Cirque Journal, Off the Coast and Poetry Salzburg. His book, November Reconsideredwas published by Cirque Press. Janssen also coordinates the Salem Poetry Project, a weekly reading, the annual Salem Poetry Festival, and was a 2020 nominee for Oregon Poet Laureate.