Amethyst Review

   The Tree Stood in the Wood

      meditation on "Dream of the Rood"


	The tree stood in the wood
but no one saw     there were so
many trees     each a cross without 
a form     a form without a cross
leaves and branches making
their own story

	So day goes     night comes
the dark surround     forms lose shape    
hours go their way       so night passes 
mid-night comes     the darkest hour
crossing a time divide    weight of sorrow    
perhaps      a longing for a new    
tomorrow        midnight moves 
making room for the march of morning

	Grief     I look for you
but you are gone     the dream too 
of the rood road way truth and light
drenched in the slow blood
of on-coming day     along
a vein of hands nailed 
to an ancient rite 
	
	If the tree speaks may it call
to me in Your name make me new
in the new dawn's day 

Cordelia Hanemann is writer and artist in Raleigh, NC. She has published in  journals: Atlanta Review,  Southwestern Review, and Laurel Review; anthologies, The Poet Magazine’s Friends and Friendship, Heron Clan and Kakalakand in a chapbook. Her poems have won awards and been nominated for prizes. Recently the featured poet for Negative Capability Press and The Alexandria Quarterly, she is now working on a first novel, about her roots in Cajun Louisiana. 

conversations with your god


last night i spoke to your god.
he told me his head hurts.
how he loathes the cacophony 
of prayers, the sound
like
“a thousand trains 
on a thousand rusty tracks.”


he may have been holy once,
but now he is rotten
on the inside like a fruit 
left in the sun.

i fell to my knees 
like they taught me in church,
i played the sunday-school girl,
asked for mercy
and got misery.

your god laughed--
howled until he
spilled tears down his white robes.

 last night i fought with your god,
and shoved him out the door
like a no-good drunk.

he stumbled over his 
wild white beard

and splayed across my floor,
your god bloody on the tile,
as broken as we are.

i learned that yelling at god
and expecting him to answer 
is like throwing a glass at a wall
and expecting the wall to crumble.

your god heard me cry 
and he wept along,
and when i was done
we raged together.
monkey-see
monkey-do.
it is hard for him to give 
if all you do is take.

i looked in the mirror in the
winter morning.
and saw a girl 
instead of a wildfire 
for the first time.

god was a terrible roommate.
he used my shower.
he left on my lights.

and, just to let you know,
when he was done with me,
god took my coat
and meandered down to the seven eleven
for a payday bar and a bud light.

Anna Ferris is a high school writer from Pittsburgh, PA. She is a rising senior. Sometimes she is reading, sometimes she is walking. Sometimes both. She is Lebanese, Syrian, German, and human.

Scorch



“You love without burning,”
Augustine observed of God—
as if the miracle of love,
combustible as dry grass,
might flash into flame,
scorching the soul of man.
Or smolder, its embers
remnants of creation’s burden:
to be made in His image,
unworthy of the brand—
wisps of smoke
trailing from our skin,
reaching out with blazing hand
toward everything we venerate,
cherish, adore. Like Midas,
but with fire instead of gold.

Alfred Fournier is an entomologist, writer and community volunteer living in Phoenix, Arizona. His poetry and prose have appeared in Lunch Ticket, Plainsongs, Toho Journal, Welter, Ocotillo Review and elsewhere. New work is forthcoming at The Main Street Rag and The Perch Magazine.

Confession
 
Knowing this place to be not hurried,
I came for darkness –
for the temporary shading and softening of shadows,
the thought of cold, night air moving in,
its thickness settling and staying
for the duration of sky
or as long as it was needed.
Stories must be told and retold many times.
Forgive me, but this is how I remember.

Sarah Rehfeldt lives with her family in western Washington where she is a writer, artist, and photographer.  Her poems have appeared in Presence; Blueline, Appalachia; and Weber – The Contemporary West.  She finds inspiration in the close-up world of macro nature photography.  Favorite subjects include her garden; the forest; cloudscapes; and the ever-plentiful raindrops of western Washington.  You can view her photography web pages at:  www.pbase.com/candanceski

Repetition



…a poet must be torn in two in such a way as to close the way to all deceptions.
					—Soren Kierkegaard
					Journals. 1850




			The ghost arrives. He sits and starts to write.
			His sharp eyes staring from an unlined face,
			he speaks low while scribbling into the night.

			“You think,” he says, “that you leap towards light—
			you’re nimble, jumping over a candle’s small flame.
			You watch for the coming of words to write.

			You start. You stop. You see her face, her bright
			deep eyes.” You let him talk on while you place,
			without speaking, a glass, darker than night,

			of wine before him. You’re framing a fight
			you won’t have. You’d like to be sure to say
			something he’d like, something he’d want to write.

			“You don’t understand,” he keeps on, “this rite
			we repeat is a game you made up. A play.
			It’s you who speaks while I scribble all night.

			This balances your left hand and your right
			eye. You let me appear to bear the blame
			for disturbing all these words you won’t write.”
			Flame blows out. A scribbled page lights the night.

 

Mark J. Mitchell’s latest full-length poetry collection is Roshi, San Francisco (Norfolk Press). A novel, The Magic War is available from Loose Leaves Publishing. He studied  at Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver and George Hitchcock. His work appeared in several anthologies and hundreds of periodicals. He lives with his wife, Joan Juster, where he made his living pointing out pretty things in San Francisco. Now, like many others, he’s unemployed.

Sister Felicity

fifty years a bride of Christ 
hiding her arms thin with labor 
in the habit the young ones reject.

she watches them in their blue suits 
they look like old Girl Scouts 
she thinks, but does not say

now she barely remembers her childhood home 
her father swinging her high in the cherry orchard 
so she could pick the lowest fruit,

fifty years of laundry 
of the saying of the hours,
hard carved chairs in the chapel, Matins, Lauds.

often alone in the chapel 
while the younger sisters slept,
singing although her voice is flat and harsh.

Sister Felicity do you remember me, 
disobedient child who did not wince 
at the ruler’s crack, whose angry initials

ate into the scarred oak desktop, 
whose shouts from the cloakroom prison 
disturbed the recitation?

Sister Felicity, I would kneel
next to you now on the hard concrete, 
say the words you tried so hard to teach me.

Journals publishing Janet McCann’s work include Kansas Quarterly, Parnassus, Nimrod, Sou’Wester, America,  The Christian Century, Christianity and Literature, News York Quarterly, Tendril, and others. A 1989 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship winner, she taught at Texas A & M University from 1969-2016, is now Professor Emerita. Most recent poetry collection: The Crone at the Casino (Lamar University Press,  2014). 

Nostalgie de la Poussière


There is no fresher moment than this one:
Like the new white heartwood of a tree
Or that un-blackened part of a chimney flue,
Flame-swept, or a kitten kept well-licked.
Yes.

But, even when seductive memories, like dusty flecks,
Are flicked away in one, grand, impulsive gesture,
Yes, especially, even, in that sweet,
Mindful time of courage,
Does the cruelty of nostalgie strike:

For, knowing that a moment known
And fully met means death to it,
The quiet pain of this repeat embrace
Compresses to a jewel
Of exquisite note and cut. But
In the gathering contemplation
Of such moments,
Precious gems though they may be,
They are still just motes of dust
Obscuring merely

That clear tip of now which demonstrates,
When scoured of all nostalgic hours...
There is no sweeter state other than this
Nor place, nor polished moment more fine nor braver
To ache or repine for.

Clive Donovan devotes himself full-time to poetry and has published in a wide variety of magazines including Acumen, Agenda, Fenland Poetry Journal, Neon Lit. Journal, Prole, Sentinel Lit. Quarterly and Stand. He lives in Totnes, Devon, U.K. quite close to the river Dart. His debut collection will be published by Leaf by Leaf in November 2021.  

Thoughts about Writing and the Sacred

It is impossible for me to speak about the relationship between writing and the sacred without first saying that I’m a Benedictine nun living monastic life.  Monks and nuns understand our vocation in many ways – it is contemplative, scriptural, liturgical, ecclesial, to name a few – but underlying all and giving meaning to all is the motif of searching for God.  This experience of searching for God is so vital to our vocation that it cannot be overstated.  For the monastic person, the search for God is everything; it is the path of self-giving that leads us to personal fulfilment – more so, for us, even than the great forms of self-dedication usually regarded as being essential to happiness: marriage, family, career, and a certain amount of what’s understood as ‘freedom.’  

What this has to do with a conversation about writing and the sacred is this: for me, writing poetry is a mode of searching for God and is positioned exactly in the centre of my Christian identity and my monastic vocation.  For, although God is undeniably present in every moment of every day, at the same time, and paradoxically, God’s presence and purposes are stunningly elusive.  This changes, however, when I try to ‘look’ through the wide lens of a poem.  Then, something about the sacred is disclosed to me as I write – even if the poem does not reference God in an obvious way.  

This mysterious disclosure of God that happens in the process of writing a poem presupposes faith, then.  But faith alone would not be enough to make a poem engage with the sacred.  I must also be in dialogue with my own ‘inner atheist’ as I write.  I contend that every person, no matter how faith-filled, has one, lurking in the darkened corner of the soul, just waiting to slink out in moments of profound loss or  crisis.  This atheistic aspect of the self, ever in need of evangelisation, needs to be acknowledged.  I may not allude to it in the poem I’m working on, but I know it’s there.  Some poems weaken my ‘inner atheist’; others expose her activity and formidable power – without coming to a clear resolution.  They show the raw material upon which grace still needs to work.  Every poem I write, then, is somehow a dialogue between belief and unbelief – life and death.  It is the dialogue of Easter, the paschal mystery, personalised.  

I like to think of a poem, then, as a sort of ‘theo-scope’, a word I’ve invented to describe something that functions in relation to the sacred like a microscope or telescope functions in relation to the natural world.  Only, instead of enabling me to look at something really tiny or something very far away, the poem, as ‘theo-scope’, enables me to look into something, to discover not only what is there now, today, but also what is eternally there, what is True about it, and what is sacred in it.

Johanna Caton, O.S.B., is a Benedictine nun.  She was born in the United States and lived there until adulthood, when her monastic vocation took her to England, where she now resides.  Her poems have appeared in The Christian Century, The Windhover, The Ekphrastic Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Catholic Poetry Room, and other venues, both online and print.  

HOLY ISLAND


They walked, 
Crossed spike-ridged sand,
Feet-tearing shells and analytic rocks,
Trod
Steel-sharp sea, a scything wind
Battered skin-roughening wool on sopping legs.
They planted
Fragile cells upon a ridge
Beneath storm- beaten skies and gannets’ shriek.
Rough hand shaped stones
Made their bare square church,
Its music the seals’ fluting cries, percussion of the waves.
Nothing between them and God.

Numb fingers toiled to make word flesh.
Restriction here produced
A flowering of glory, a riot of blossoms, angels, beasts
Entwined as one.
A whole world singing from this barren rock,
And siren-like it drew in souls
To harbour in its grace.

All gone.
Behind the glory of the floating vaults,
The crowds whose chatter bounces from the walls, 
 Their nameless graves are hidden in the turf.
The sea withdraws again,
Across devouring sands,
The birds cry,
And the pilgrims come,
To look for what was lost.

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 spend a lot of her time writing and making a new garden. 

Minks

Barely dawn, I bring my sleepless weight
to the lake, but not even the tannic
fresh of balsam can toss it from me.
Then a few feet away a snout
pokes out from a pocket of roots.
She pulls free with three more
trailing in a velvet line.
 
They funnel into the sheep laurel, drowsy
with blossoms that barely tremble
from the slip of their skins,
sable so radiant, deep as mercy.
 
And as if that were not enough,
seeing four at once,
the last and smallest and most curious
stops, all still paws and twitching tail,
to get his fill of me until a chittering
calls him to dive into the laurel,
a gasp of musk in his wake.
 
I knew when you returned, my shadow mood.
You arrived weeks ago and unpacked with creeping deliberation
your dark luggage, thought by sinking thought, while I
minced about on sock toes in demanding silence.
 
But now I see—yours is thankless work,
delivering what’s needed.
Me, for one, to the gaze of creature kin
where I might throw off this dense, dull mat of distance
between me and splendor.

Sylvia Karman’s work has appeared in Delmarva Review, Blueline, and Writing the Land, among others. She lives in the Adirondack mountains of New York and in central Maryland where she hikes and writes for the love of the journey. You can visit her at www.sylviakarman.com .