Amethyst Review

Lemniscate

(the Hanged Man)

You are upending.
Wisdom streams upwards
from below.

You are sole to soul now
with the Earth,
dazzled by her deep Light.

Inversion point.
The crossing at your sun centre
is activated:

total polar reverse…
shock waves racing, galaxy wide…

you are hanging into the sky now,

from one foot.

Everywhere,
everywhere,
you see stars
shining,
shining,
shining out
from the hearts of friends.

Love is the shift key.

Love is the shift.

Jehanne Mehta is a singer–songwriter and poet, focussing especially on our connection with Nature and the Earth and also on our own inner changes and evolution. With her group ‘Earthwards’ she has recorded several CDs and has five published collections of poems. Jehanne Mehta.com

The Book of Baa

all that remains of Habakkuk

Lord
I have heard
you
repeat
Lord
like the sunrise
Lord
you
lift
sun and moon

with
my
own ear
you pierce
my
head

when
you trample
the sea with your
lips
my bones
tremble

yet I will wait patiently
as
the fig tree
Lord

Lord
like the feet of a
sheep

The Book of Haze

all that remains of Zephaniah

morning by morning
shoulder to shoulder
oppressors
will
consume
but
you
will not be found in their mouths

do not trust
roaring lions
evening wolves
or
people

obey
no one

do not let your hands hang
your God

Katie Manning is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review and an Associate Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She is the author of Tasty Other, which won the 2016 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, and four chapbooks, including The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman. Her poems have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, New Letters, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and many journals and anthologies. Find her online at www.katiemanningpoet.com.

‘These poems are from a project-in-process that uses the last chapter of each book of the Bible as a word bank. I began this project in protest–I was tired of people taking language from the Bible out of context and using it against others as a weapon–but as I continued I realized that this process of creating poems also resembles the practice of Lectio Divina, divine reading’

Walking Into the Next Room

It was one of those moments where you walk into a room and do you forget why you went there. Clearly you’d forgotten something but you don’t remember what it was. That’s what it was for me. At that moment. Walking into that room. Not really certain why it was that I was walking into that room. And knowing that I’d forgotten something. And it was something that was really important. But I couldn’t remember what it was. Because I couldn’t remember why wanted to the room presumably.

But maybe there was more to it than that. I didn’t know exactly what it was. I had no idea exactly what it could be. As near as I can make out of it must not of been very important as it was the case that I had rather casually forgotten that. And I knew that really important things weren’t likely to be forgotten just at the entrance for room or anything like that. So I figured I was probably pretty much OK with the whole situation. One moment I was in one room and the next moment I was in the next room. And I just Jordan forgotten how I got in to be there. And there was something kind of big about that assessment that seem to be prominently wrong. But I couldn’t seem to remember exactly what it was.

I took a mental inventory of everything that I’ve done. And everything that I was doing. And everything that was going on my life. And there seem to be a major discrepancy between what I remember and what was actually going on. I felt as though there is something really basic that I was missing but I couldn’t remember what it was. It started to seem like maybe it wasn’t really even any of my business what it was. But I knew I was missing something fairly major. And I couldn’t figure out what it was. Add all of this needless and senseless repetition just kept going through my skull.

And I knew that I wasn’t really getting anywhere. Clearly I had forgotten something. But I couldn’t remember what it was. And it was a bit of a distraction. It was a bit of a distortion. actually I just sort of hit me as I walked out of the room to go back to wherever it was that I had been. I had walked from the room that I found myself into the other room and then back again when it occurred to me what I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten about the past 10 years. Or sell. I had casually forgotten about the past 10 years. And I was sort of scrambling to try to figure out what was going on as I was sort of losing my balance. I mean, there I was in one room and there he was in the other room. And that I have lost ten years of past. Then that I just sort of forgotten about. Casually. On my way from one room to the next. And I knew it was not exactly healthy to have casually miss placed the 10 years like that.

But I knew that I was onto something. And there was a kind of a satisfaction and haven’t been able to figure it out in the first place. I mean, you lose something that big and it’s really easy to forget. I mean I know the logic there doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. But it stands to reason that if you lose something as big as 10 years that your mind is going to find a way to compensate. Just for the sake of your own sanity. I mean, they are you are completely absent from a whole decade of your own life. Are you going to go crazy if you fully acknowledge it.

So maybe it’s just so big it’s like the elephant in the room or whatever. You didn’t know it was there because it clearly was way too big to be fully acknowledge it. Just sort of deal with it and move on. The way people move on from the size of the universe for the fact that we have enough nuclear weapons to completely wipe out all the life on the planet or that were in the middle of the biggest extinction in the history of the world or whatever. Are used to serve except those are the things and move on because you don’t really have anything else to do.

But there was the whole issue that I was still not entirely dealing with. The whole issue of whether or not I really should be concerned about having lost 10 years of my life from one room to the next. Clearly something it happened and it was probably going to happen again and if it did I would be like 20 years older than I was when I got up from the couch just now. And that’s not something anyone has to deal with. Or want to have to deal with.

And so maybe if I just walk back towards it’ll be 10 years ago. That’s kind of what I’m figuring. I know the logic doesn’t make a whole lot of sense they are. But it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that it would take you 10 years to move from one room to the next anyway so I figure is long as nothing is making sense I might as will just walk backwards through the last 10 years that I missed. And it really feels like I’m sitting there like the 10 years didn’t happen. I figure it probably is the case that the 10 years didn’t happen. And I’m looking at the watch and I’m looking at the date then I’m figuring that’s probably the case although I’m so confused right now it’s so hard to tell.

At the very least, I’m comfortable. I feel perfectly healthy. And I don’t feel 10 or even 20 years older. So I guess I’ve got that much going on. However, I really have to pay closer attention. This sort of thing can happen out of nowhere. That’s what they tell me.

Two Gods

I. Esus with an Axe

As if he were winter itself
Esus goes at the willow tree,
goes to prune it back for a time,

promising a spring without blades.
And as if they were winter itself,
the egrets in the willow tree

consider how the cold must come,
consider where all souls must go,
and surrender the willow to fly.

And as if it were winter itself
the marsh beside the willow tree
cools and freezes and hides beneath ice,

beneath the cracking axe of Esus,
beneath the iron sun, iron clouds,
beside the low willow in winter.

II. Sucellus: The Wine God

Every now and then, why not, give your time
to the drunk old man – the hammer he holds
struck winter out of the earth after all,
and gave us the grapes that got him all groggy,
the barrel overflowing and the jar
overturned, the amphorae running over.
He’s not the most graceful god, not in spring,
but remember that his hammer is thunder,
that his hammer is the reliable wheel
and his body is covered in the serious
signs that the dark of deep winter were made for –
so join him while his hammer is on the ground
and while, stumbling, he gives a smile over at you.

Tim Miller writes about religion, history and poetry at www.wordandsilence.com. These poems are from a larger collection on (mostly spiritual) life in prehistoric Europe, the entirety of which will appear later this year from The High Window Press. Other poems from this collection have appeared in Crannog, Londongrip, The High Window, Poethead, Cider Press Review, Cumberland River Review, Isacoustic, The Big Windows Review, The Basil O’Flaherty, Albatross, The Journal (Wales), and others.

Relic

As to relics:
there are three orders of magnitude:

for the first the saint is dug
from his years of rest,
a ghost bone taken,
shattered lovingly
with hammer blows
and the infinite particulate, packaged.

Then the second order:
something touched by him,
perhaps a scrap of clothing,
that he slept or ate in,
with the smell of him still
in its arid weave,
echoing his rigid sainthood.

Last but not lost:
new cloth must drape his cere limbs
then that be taken, scissored
and each microchip of bone white linen
sieve him through it.

He is gone and continues.

Paul Bregazzi’s poetry has appeared widely in print and on-line in Ireland, the U.K., France, Mexico and the U.S. His work has been shortlisted and awarded in numerous competitions in Europe and the U.S., including the Bridport Prize. He was Cuirt New Writer of the Year 2017.

Art

If you find that luminous blue bubble
whose irregular roundness can wobble
and squeeze between things yet still hold its shape
it will roll over your affairs and escape
like an eye, a fluid lens, a droplet
that magnifies with no fixed comment yet
on its curved distorted focus. It must
be made well, constructed out of itself
in such a way that it has no edges
no unravelling seams but is endless
and flares up translucent like a blue flame
answering with the wholeness of its name.

Diana Durham is the author of three poetry collections: Sea of Glass (Diamond Press); To the End of the Night (Northwoods Press) Between Two Worlds (Chrysalis Poetry); the nonfiction The Return of King Arthur (Tarcher/Penguin); a debut novel The Curve of the Land (Skylight Press); and a dramatic retelling of grail myth Perceval & the Grail: Perceval & the Grail Part 1 Morgana’s Retelling – YouTube

Acts of Faith

 
Morning sunlight slants
through tall trees catches
a single filament adrift
– spotlights the tiny spider
floating at its end.

She has cast off from some
high branch, sailing on
the variable breeze
patient of chance, apt
for the undetermined landing.

Stories relate how scholars,
saints, would once put out
to sea in flimsy coracles
trusting their landfall
to the grace of providence

– which would reveal some place
where they were meant to be.

Tony Lucas lives in London, south of the river. Stride published some of his early work, and he was a regular contributor to Ambit for a good number of years, among other magazines.  His latest collection, Unsettled Accounts, was published by Stairwell Books, two years ago.

Forsythia

Not rose or lily—lovely as they are—
but irrepressible forsythia
should be the quintessential Easter flower.

Rampant yellow, it basks against blue skies,
but leaps, exulting, on rainy days.
It clashes with your pastel dress.

Unruly, its branches arc from earth to heaven.
The cross-shaped flower shouts Alleluia,
heralding the green leaf,

hissing at death
with the force of its whispered name:
forsythia.

Jennifer Davis Michael is Professor and Chair of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mezzo Cammin, Southern Poetry Review, Literary Mama, Switchgrass Review, and Cumberland River Review.

The Good Void

Though I ride through flood and through flame
Through death throes and the birthing of a world
Through the battlefield’s roar and the
Peace of the ships of no thought
Crossing the windless sea;
Though I sift through sands of delusion
Boundless as the truth,
May I come at last
To the Good Void.

Though I journey vasts of jungles
And searing desert plains,
Through the savagery of cities
And the mute grief of the earth
Through the vortex of the mind
Pulled out to open sea
By stronger currents of the heart;
Though my ending be
Where I pristinely start
May I come at last
To the Good Void.

Through all I have done for the light
And the many wrongs I have failed to right
Though the flowers of enlightenment are grown
From the dung heap of self will –
Fell pride of Adam and the fall,
Though I climb the peaks of heaven
Down the stairwells of hell
Though I wrestle my way through the veil
And would tear it entirely from her face,
I cannot see the beauty of it all
Till I come at last
To the Good Void.

Though I am come with the wound of riches
From the wasted realms of ten thousand kings,
I am an old gentleman of the road
Who has nothing, and sleeps in a ditch!
Though I am that I am
Through the dreaming of dreams
And nightmares without end
Though I’d shine like an angel of light
To the elect on the crystalline walls of Jerusalem,
My flesh shrivels daily
On this bag of bones
Till I come at last
To the Good Void.

Alan Rycroft was born in London in 1957, though long based in Bristol with his family. His life has often taken him on a planetary odyssey being a qualified Lecturer with an MA in Applied Linguistics, he has been engaged in teaching English across universities and companies in the Middle East and Far East. He has been much privileged and enriched to imbibe and interact with so many faith traditions and cultural influences globally.  All the while he says poetry has been a constant comfort, companion and mentor, has quietly distilled a profound and rich internal dialogue of self understanding and realization, at once a form of therapy and illumination, as well as exacting taskmaster and craft. Simultaneously , the  poetic venture has been a conversing with inner Spirit, trying to catch that ever elusive resonance and the multidimensional voices of the heart, by turns, colloquial human and every day, mythic, shamanistic, high philosophical and spiritually enlightening striving for a universal authentic explication.  His Collection At the Steep Face of Your Heart is forthcoming; he can be contacted on : arycroft@yahoo.com

Spirit

As the lock on life finally clicks
And the hand that held the key is held up high
When its fingers point inward from the mix,
Is there the chance the dance of death might die
Before the closing speeches on the day
Conclude the teachers’ teaching is for those
Who know there is no truth in what they say
Only for what each of us already knows
That, just around the corner from where the spirit breathes
Lies understanding that no love loves, dies, then leaves?

Julian Nangle is 70 years old, is married and has had 5 children, and now has 11 grand children. He is a poet, publisher (as Words Press), rare book dealer (as Words Etcetera) and psychotherapist. He has been writing poems since he was in his teens and published some in the little magazines during the 60’s and 70’s. He has produced 4 collections of poems, the last being ‘Windfalls’ in 2014. He is poetry editor for the magazine Self & Society. In September 2017 he lost his youngest daughter to cancer which has prompted many poems relating to grief and loss. The poem published here is just one of them.