Amethyst Review

The mercury cathedral

 
shows the temperature
in silver columns.

Quicksilver dogma
does not leave the body,

weighs both visitor
and congregation down,

a heavy metal heaven.

 

The alchemic cathedral

is always about
to become gold

if the right equation
or magic can be found.

You can waste
a lifetime here.

 

The cathedral of bones

is a grim place to be,
a sad place to worship.

There is no life
or resurrection,

just deathly silence
arguing with ghosts.

 

The cathedral of sound

is all echoes
and murmuration,
the faint memory
of song and readings,
a distant eulogy;
someone crying
for forgiveness.

 

The cathedral of fire

burns without smoke,
and belief and faith
are not consumed.

Their god is
a thunderstorm
passing through

a break in the forest
designed
to stop the spread.

 

The cathedral of sand

is waiting for the tide
to wash it all away.

Who made the bucket
and turned out
this crumbling mound?

Who did the spade work,
bought the ice creams?

 

The cathedral of doubt

takes uncertainty to new heights,
never offers any answers,
encourages questions
and wonder and worry,
leaves everything unsaid.

 

Rupert 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).

Sparring at the Party of the Literati

Always the fate questions waiting
on the acquaintances’ lips at the party
of literate friends and erudite foes in the city
row house while the host serves plates
of ceviche, roe, and paté. Two guests arrive
late, then proceed to obliterate
the conversation in medias res. Spectators
all of us, Godot-esque, we wait for
the boxing match to begin and end
with one determination—free will or fate,
the sated winner holding one victorious
boxing glove while the other hand hesitates.

 

Maureen Sherbondy‘s most recent book is BELONGINGS. She lives in Durham, North Carolina. She teaches English at a community college.

Order and the Soul

 
We might have climbed to Heaven
on a rope of sound
listening to Ockeghem or
Victoria, back when choirs made
music of the soul.
………………………We might have got there
in a cell, deep
in austerity and stone
with the longing for light as a guide.
So much money
……………………has changed hands since then;
the Earth has tipped this way
and that, while souls
were pulled apart in the wind.
…………………………………………………Each morning
a mountain appears, made of light,
and the air fills with wings. As for
the soul, it has a hard day
ahead keeping time
with obligations, staying quiet through
the noise, and wandering
alone.
…………But it survives on scents
and colors, has an ear
for harmony, and sees order
in the rough and rugged way the pieces
of the world fall into place
after every storm.

David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems often reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. These characteristics are evident in an upcoming publication: Reading T. S. Eliot to a Bird, from Hoot ‘n Waddle Press.

Harami

Out of the old comes the new
improbably, impossibly even—these gnarled
dead-looking twisted olive trunks
some cut from half way off the ground
spreading into a spray of fresh green above
the dead wood transitioning into the living,
resurrected: the seemingly dead, the foundation
the lesson learnt, suffered, become celebration
reaching up into a cloudless blue sky
on this white stony beach by a turquoise sea
where stone gives way to sound at its liminal edge
you wade out into, launching your chest in its release.

 

Lakka

 

Jay Ramsay, who co-founded Angels of Fire in London in 1983 with its Festivals of New Poetry, is the author of 30 + books of poetry, non-fiction, and classic Chinese translation (with Martin Palmer) including Psychic Poetry—a manifesto, The White Poem, Alchemy, Crucible of Love–the alchemy of passionate relationships, Tao Te Ching, I Ching—the shamanic oracle of change, Shu Jing—the Book of History, The Poet in You (his correspondence course, since 1990), Kingdom of the Edge—Selected Poems 1980-1998, Out of Time—1998-2008, Places of Truth, Monuments, and Agistri Notebook (both 2014). In 2012 he recorded his poetry-music album, Strange Sun. In addition, he’s edited 6 anthologies of New Poetry—most recently Diamond Cutters—Visionary Poets in America, Britain & Oceania (with Andrew Harvey: www.tayenlane.com), as well as many collections for other poets, also under his own pamphlet imprint Chrysalis Poetry. He’s also poetry editor of Caduceus magazine, working in private practice as a UKCP accredited psychotherapist and healer, and running workshops worldwide (www.jayramsay.co.uk).

A cathedral of feathers

 
would weigh almost nothing
and be easy to move
but some people are allergic;
it might attract cats.

If choir or congregation
breathed out,
faith would blow away.

The god is not to be sneezed at.

 

The cathedral of light

is a beacon in the dark,
consumes more power
than it generates,
disturbs the sleep of all.

There are no shadows
or room for wonder.
Everything is illuminated
and bleached out.

 

The cathedral of flesh

is momentary and fluid,
collapses into disarray,
longing and memory
rekindled as desire.

 

The cathedral of milk

is pure white
but not needed by adults,

has turned sour and bitter
over time.

 

The dream cathedral

is the greatest of all
but is never finished.
Its spires touch heaven,
its stained glass windows
contain every colour,
its tower is the tallest
in the land, its nave
and choir the emptiest.

 

A paper cathedral

can be unfolded
and folded at will.

One square sheet
and a few deft moves
see it gently lock
into place. It can be
recycled or made again.

 

Rupert 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).

From a Pistic Frame

There was no one to scumble
effusions of emotional strafe.
Connectives through sentential
etchings altered my state. Soon
I sensed: lation of thought is
mightier than its impeller. How-
ever meaningful a postulation
it’s outcome of an active mind
anatomizing a minuscule. We
are ill-equipped to sense the
supernal rota. Allegiance to
prie-dieu leads to light.

Sanjeev Sethi is the author of three books of poetry. His poems are in venues around the world:   A Restricted View From Under The Hedge, Pantry Ink, Bonnie’s Crew, Morphrog 16, Mad Swirl, The Penwood Review, Faith Hope & Fiction, Communion Arts Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Mumbai, India.

 

Used Bookstore

I am met by a labyrinthian assortment of shelves,
………….the smell of ink on yellowed paper, ideas placed

under the auspices of reality, but by no means
………….claimed by it. I feel that, as I trace my finger

across the spines, dust building under
………….my nail, that Plato must have been wrong.

Had he stood here, amongst Wordsworth,
………….Hardy, Woolf, Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Steinbeck,

he might have had a sense of the divine within
………….the temporal, a merger somewhere between these

stacks. Here the realm of ideas meets substance,
………….here there are no forms. In this collection, taciturn, reticent

and, yet, loquacious and expansive, lies paradox.
………….As they sit between shelves so, also, do books

straddle heaven and earth, a firm,
………….iron-wrought, paper bridge between spheres.

Christian Mack is currently an undergraduate English and History major at Trevecca Nazarene University and is on the editorial board of Nashville-based literary journal, The Cumberland River Review. His work is forthcoming in Front Porch Review.

To Fly

I sit at my computer
day after day
the blue light
a slow flicker
before tired eyes

From the corner
of my eye I spy
the flicker of Anna’s throat
a flash of ruby thrum-hum
seeking new nectar

Playful nuthatch
hanging upside down
on the feeder’s metal mesh
gorges himself
on sunflower seeds

The house-husband finch
at home on his perch
shows me his bright
red crown, waits for me
to praise his beauty

At the end of the day
a sharp pain shoots
behind my shoulder blade
I’m ready
to release my wings and fly

 

Shawn Aveningo Sanders started out as show-me girl from Missouri and after a bit of globetrotting finally landed in Portland, Oregon. She is a widely published poet who can’t stand the taste of coconut, eats pistachios daily and loves shoes—especially red ones! (redshoepoet.com) Shawn’s work has appeared in over 130 literary journals and anthologies. She’s a Pushcart nominee (2015), Best of the Net nominee (2017), co-founder of The Poetry Box, managing editor for The Poeming Pigeon, and winner of the first poetry slam in Placerville, California (2012). Shawn is a proud mother of three and shares the creative life with her husband in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon.

Every day I try to sit for a spell, to begin to create. Sometimes I’m successful, sometimes I’m not. I never know the difference. I try to transcend the ordinary in a way that sings, that comes alive, that speaks to me in ways I can’t always describe. In that sense, writing for me is as mystical an experience as prayer. Perhaps you feel the same.

I’d like to think I’m being led by the Spirit to work on myself, to discover more about what lies within. Unlike therapy or counseling, I’m not looking for a “cure” or a diagnosis. Or publication. For me it like early morning exercise on a good day — a way to feel better about myself, and the world.

It’s mystical, of course. As I sit to create I am almost completely unaware of what I’m about to say, and that perhaps is the biggest blessing I receive in creating poetry and in encountering the sacred. My soul is led on mindful paths that I would never have imagined when I first sat down – the lid of a peanut butter jar; a blue jay rising and falling from a porch railing to the deck; an exchange between two lovers in a Christopher Isherwood novel.

Where am I going to be led today? Free to sing in the shape of a sonnet. In the rules of grammar. In the play of assonance.

Here’s my center: I’m doing something that I love to do. Just like prayer, like mediation, like worship. With all the consolations and desolations, I feel called to move forward.

And isn’t that how the mystical beckons us? A chance to savor our intuition of the divine, in this quiet moment? A cup of coffee, a blank notepad, a favorite pen, a laptop… all elements which look so solitary, but actually open us all to the mystery of life that surrounds each one of us.

And isn’t that enough, as we, preparing for our unknown last breath, can feel once again the joy of a moment well lived?

 

Chuck Thompson has an MA in English from the University of Massachusetts, and his published work includes Busy and Blessed: 10 Simple Steps for Parents Seeking Peace (Christian Insight Press, 2014). He’s also a secondary school chaplain and spiritual director in Chicago, Illinois.

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This is another in a series of short reflections on writing and spirituality. Please consider submitting one of your own – the editor would be pleased to read it with a view to publication in Amethyst Review.