Amethyst Review

Meeting Minutes (Friends Meeting House, Rochester)

Hobbled by life, I searched for open doors
to escape this boastful, plug-in city.
Found one, just as the weather was coming fast. 
In here, my place was already set
with silence waiting, inviting me to sit.

Silence was a hail-fellow-well-met type
(of hitherto, I had not cared for), but
he had friends – each with eyes closed, 
messaging in their own private channels. I joined them
bringing only an elevated ear.

My blood clock listed the seconds, minutes. 
I watched shadows sit, stretch, then rise to leave – 
and then return like jealous agnostics.
Silence worked the room – a trainer breathing, 
train rails seething, the brush of frond on glass.

Silence told me, but I never asked.
Spoke with mailed fist – I considered leaving,
but silence invited me to sit.
Spoke with bare-knuckle – and I rose to leave, 
but silence invited me to sit.

With ten minutes left, silence left me to it
and when my ungummed, Wedgewood eyes opened,
something came on and came on unbidden.
Something much bigger than the rational,
something once buried, something once hidden.

Into drying weather and milk happy,
into once engraved streets (storm windows down),
into a human river – broad, boiling.
I heard nothing – and have heard nothing, since
the day silence invited me to sit.

 

Joseph Long lives and works on the Medway as a father and Engineer, writing poetry between shifts. He has a passion for works which reflect working class life & culture and his main influences are John Cooper Clarke, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell, Douglas Dunn, Ian Hamilton & Seamus Heaney.
Joseph has been published by Stand, Blackbox Manifold, The Rumen, The Brussels Review and ingénu/e and he was also highly commended in the Erbacce Prize for Poetry in 2024.

Children of Encouragement

Gray stone chapel waiting
in the new green morning
I pull the door and plunge 
into still shadow thick 
as a carpet of pine 

I start about the business
of setting up for Mass
laying out the books
the booklets the chairs
shake out twelve 

perfect creamy wafers 
from their plastic sleeve
place them on a paten
of green clay swirling
smooth as sea glass 

mix wine with water
my own miniscule miracle
click a hot pink lighter
touch flame to dusty wicks
breathe in and wait

more arrive hushed
and sleepy-eyed 
not many but enough 
for us to say Amen
and hear another’s voice

saying Amen too
this is no great ecstasy
just simple people simply
praying—oh, for more
ordinary love like this 

Erika Takacs is an Episcopal priest, teacher, and poet originally from Wilmington, Delaware. Her writing has been published in Earth & Altar, The Christian Century, Braided Way, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and as a part of the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Poetry in Plain Sight. Outside of her work and her family, her three great loves are the music of J.S. Bach, books, and baseball. She currently resides in North Carolina, where she and her husband serve at the pleasure of their very spoiled beagle.

Cellular Theology

It is late. He should sleep, but tonight the monk feels a restless pull from the manuscript before him. Under the frail, flickering candle, the illuminated capital letter (the T of Tau) shimmers with gold filigree. It is a beacon—but the apostle’s words that follow are dull, mere shadows. Whenever this mood descends, everything becomes leaden—all that is real is the sullen flesh. His hand rests heavy on the vellum: calf skin. His quill is nothing but a bird feather: a dead thing plucked from a dead thing.

His gaze drifts to the whimsy added by a previous brother in Christ: a single peacock feather decorating the margin. Inexplicable. Indulgent. Why does it rivet him now?

His mind fixates on a vast peacock strutting before drab peahens, and regards his own drab robe—his solitary cell. He curses himself. Why does everything distract? Even in this cold, dark stone room—or because it is so plain?—so many serpentine streams flow underground into indulgent fantasy. Self-regard. A species of sloth. Why do feeble minds twist away, perverse, from the sacred source: the refreshing lake of God’s presence? 

His mind fans out at the vague threat of Viking invasion. He fantasizes about killing marauders—engaging in the righteous slaughter of heathens. Protecting The Word. Him! Hero martyr monk! The banality of pride…

It is not all my fault, he defends himself feebly. His imagination is vivid from all the visualization techniques the Abbot taught him as a boy, training him to recollect all manner of catechism. To this day, each sin and virtue has a geometric shape and a color for him. And if his mind drifts, it may be because he hasn’t eaten a full meal in days—partially out of devotions, but mostly by circumstance. The oat stores grow thin, and weevils wriggle in the porridge, putting him off his repast.

The abbey cat purrs in the corner. Is she enjoying infused meditation? Bright dreams of bloody murder? He remembers her asleep outside in the summer, her head resting in a halo of feathers. What is it like to hunt? To pounce and— 

No! An error! A cursed error! A repeated letter. Has he ruined the page?

He can’t lift his hand. His skin is fused with the calfskin vellum—one continuous medium. Something burns. He slides up his sleeve. Script swirls under the skin of his forearm—not Greek, Latin, Aramaic… The letters blaze. It hurts to look directly at it. He screws his eyes shut.

*** 

The peacock pattern unfurls in every direction. Within the details of each feather the monk spies interlocking figures: every martyr and persecutor, every sinner and saint, every angel and demon that has ever been or may ever be, all emerging from each other—dazzling symmetries! Consistent as syllogism! The Unsayable Form behind all forms!

Peering closer, the monk spies infinite monks with infinite concentration encoding the manuscript of manuscripts. They work in tiny cells—it is cells all the way down! Great cities emerge, and from them the City of Cities, its noise become choruses of perfection, its stink become perfume. Infinite city, and script, and scribes are one, are many. Sublime glory. 

Now the feathers part: a gate. He is the gate, the opening, the way.

***

The abbey cat wakes with a start. She mews, then pads off, preying near the stone crevices where pests cower and twitch between frantic dashes into the light. The cat is oblivious to the new image on the vellum: peacock feathers perfectly rendered, profuse, swallowing all text, all errors, all sin. Beautiful, but unreadable. As the stern Abbot would say: what human eye could draw sense from such a wayward sign?

Colm O’Shea is a Clinical Associate Professor of essay writing at New York University.

Bethany Jarmul is an Appalachian writer and poet. She’s the author of two chapbooks. Her debut poetry collection Lightning Is a Mother is forthcoming with ELJ Editions in February, 2025. Her work has been published in many magazines including Rattle, Brevity, HAD, and Salamander. Her writing was selected for Best Spiritual Literature 2023 and Best Small Fictions 2024, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Connect with her at bethanyjarmul.com or on social media: @BethanyJarmul.

Coattails


Rabbi Bluzhov recounted he was standing on one 
side of a pit with a young free thinker, their friendship 
forged in the camps, impossible anywhere else.
Two halves of a world without overlap. 
Cemented by disparate certitude, the young man 
resigned to imminent death, the rabbi adamant 
in his opposition. The Nazi, an Angel of Death, 
taunted them with life if they could jump over. 

Decades later, the rabbi recounted how 
he grasped the coattails of his father.
his father’s father, great grandfather, 
all the way to Abraham.
When he opened his eyes, both prisoners 
were standing on the other side of the pit.

The story is repeated from one century
to the next, on another continent, sometimes
in a language many doubted would survive.
Until now, on a warm Sabbath morning, 
the rabbi’s grandson recounts it to a room 
filled with believers and non-believers, 
each side still as chess pieces as they listen.

Carol V. Davis is the author of Below Zero, Because I Cannot Leave This Body and Between Storms. She won the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize (USA) for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg. Her poetry has been read on National Public Radio, the Library of Congress and Radio Russia. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she taught in Siberia, winter 2018 and teaches in Los Angeles. A 3rd Fulbright for Russia was awarded, postponed because of Covid and now cancelled. Donna Sternberg and Dancers is using Davis’ poetry in the recent piece, “Ancestors’ Voices.”

Clouds

Clouds are concentrated water vapor
held together by our dreams
shaped by wishes--
the cirrus cloud that sculpts itself
into a gull protecting its kin
feeding below as a lonely mother
looks up and holds the sight
forever in her mind
or the tops of cumulus clouds
suddenly lit by the sun
lifts a man out of his wheelchair
willing himself to walk.
  

Janet Krauss, after retirement from teaching 39 years of English at Fairfield University, continues to mentor students,  lead a poetry discussion at the Wilton Library, participate in a CT. Poetry Society Workshop, and one other plus two poetry groups. She co–leads the Poetry Program of the Black Rock Art Guild. She has two books of poetry : Borrowed Scenery (Yuganta Press) and Through the Trees of Autumn (Spartina Press).  Many of her poems have been published in Amethyst Review, and her haiku in Cold Moon Journal.

The Cure for Grief


What cure for grief
presents itself 
but to notice the
brittle rust of  
onion skin  
opening beneath the silent
knife, the hum the air makes,
the taste of bitter juices?

What balm can we reach for
but now, this moment, sealing 
it from all other moments
with the seal of faint hope?

What cure for grief but
the breathing in
and out again?

What cure for blindness
but to see?

Dean Abbott is a writer, poet and pastoral counselor living in Kentucky. He can be contacted through http://www.deanabbott.com or on X @deanabbott.

Wilda Morris who retired from a career in Christian education, is Workshop Chair of Poets and Patrons of Chicago and a past President of the Illinois State Poetry Society. She has published numerous poems in anthologies, webzines, and print publications, including Brass Bell, Haiku Canada, and Modern Haiku. She has won awards for formal and free verse and haiku. Wilda has published three books of poetry, Szechwan Shrimp and Fortune Cookies: Poems from a Chinese Restaurant, Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick, and At Goat Hollow and Other Poems.

Imagine

I feel a touch of Grandpa’s ice-grey hand 
as he heaves the words:

I can see them
their outstretched arms a bridge of gold.

His gasping mouth ellipses in rapture 
then his torso bolts erect.

He gazes an all consuming kindness 
as we watch him leave his eyes.

He had been a sailor on a warship 
was seventeen 

when seven of his mates had fallen in
to the sea’s exploding black gullet.

Their arms raised pleading
distraught heads bobbing 

called him:
Bert, Bert. 

and water slopped savage
into the silk

hollows of their lungs leaving him 
with a bandoleer of guilt.

His fellow feeling still so strong
had taken on a sweet song. 

Desire held out the other end of the stick, 
rattled something more permanent

than what that monster 
could devour.

We join hands above him 
and pray that the waves are singing

Kate Hill-Charalambides is an English teacher of dual nationality who lives in Alsace. She has worked for an association against human trafficking which is recognized as being of public utility. Her poetry focuses on human rights, spirituality and feminism. Her poetry has appeared in Dreich 3 Season 9 (No.99), Snakeskin and will appear in the next edition of Cerasus Poetry.

Holy Water, Human Water

Pluscarden Abbey and The Black Burn

I followed a narrow path high into Heldon Wood, searching for a spring. The earth was dry underfoot; there was no breeze. Just a few thin shafts sunlight made their way through the tall, close-packed trees. Common sense told me I was unlikely to find a spring this far up the northern slopes of the glen; it would have to be closer to the abbey. But there’d been no sign of one when, earlier that morning, I walked the gardens and orchards. So, I went deeper into the wood, expectations dwindling.

I’d come to Pluscarden Abbey hoping a swifter kind of water would have a story to tell. The Black Burn rises in the Morayshire hills and flows eastwards, dark and slender, until it meets the River Lossie just outside of Elgin. On its way, it passes the woods, gardens and orchards, the chapels, chapter houses and dormitories that make up the granite splendour of Pluscarden Abbey. Three hundred years of monastic life at Pluscarden came to a faltering end at the close of the sixteenth century, but in 1948 the abbey and its lands were bequeathed to the Benedictine community who now live, work and pray there. Since I’d caught my first glimpses of the abbey some eight years ago, I’d wondered if its sense of being rooted in place had something to do with the Black Burn. Had the Abbey’s founders, in the thirteenth century, searched for exactly the ‘right’ stretch of water? After all, water also plays a starring role in the bible, from the flood sent by God to punish the wicked of the earth, to John the Baptist standing waist-deep in the river Jordan. But these bible stories were pure spectacle – the stuff of Renaissance art and Hollywood movies. What about ponds and streams – weren’t these sacred too? Surely the Black Burn had to mean as much to the monks of the abbey as the ‘local’ spirits of well and burn had meant to the people of Morayshire before the coming of Christianity.

The truth had turned out to be plainer. When I’d arrived at Pluscarden Abbey the previous afternoon, I was greeted by Brother Finbar, a cheerful, bearded man, quick on his feet despite the weight of his pale Benedictine robe. He showed me to my room in the wing of the abbey reserved for ‘retreatants’, explained about meals and the religious routines, and wished me a peaceful stay. We shook hands.

‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’ I said, thinking he’d be used to retreatants with things on their mind.

‘Go ahead.’

‘I’ve been wondering about the Black Burn and its connection with the abbey. I guess it goes back a long way, all the way to the Middle Ages.’

‘Well,’ said Brother Finbar slowly, as if the question required careful thought, ‘I reckon it must have been where the monks did their business.’

So not a holy stream at all. Just a filthy one. I tried not to look disappointed.

‘I don’t think they bathed in the burn,’ Brother Finbar added, ‘but they didn’t drink from it either,’ and went on to explain that, until a few years ago, water for the abbey’s kitchen and washrooms came from a spring. ‘Such a lovely taste,’ he said, coming remarkably close to licking his lips and talking at the same time. ‘I don’t know what happened, but we had to start using mains water. Some problem with the pipes maybe.’

I felt relieved. The Abbey did, after all, have an intimate connection with local water. The only problem was that the actual location of the spring had passed him by. ‘You might try the gardens,’ he suggested, without much conviction, and hurried away to attend to other duties.

An hour later I saw Brother Finbar again, in the company of the abbey’s other monks, about fourteen in all, as they ‘proceeded’ into the chapel for the office of Vespers. Sunlight poured through stained glass windows and the old stone of the walls and floor took on a soft glow, as if the light had fallen onto deep, still water. After a moment’s silence their voices rose in a slow, sonorous wave:

Deus in adjutorium meum intende; Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina

Were all the monks accomplished singers, or did the very fabric of the abbey make anyone’s voice sound so rich and honeyed? Either way, the very air now seemed as ancient as the abbey walls. As an unapologetic, fence-sitting agnostic, with barely a scrap of Latin to his name, I wasn’t able to share in the meaning of the words, but I could bathe in the music of plainsong. And, I promised myself, I could go in search of the music of spring water the next day.

And so I found myself on a rainless July morning in the midst of a Morayshire wood, looking for water. With every uphill step the chances of finding a spring grew slimmer, but by then I was keen to get a clearer view of the abbey and the Black Burn, to see if they helped make sense of one another.

Eventually, the trees parted just enough to catch a glimpse of the abbey. Even from a distance, its roof and walls appeared old, but not out of place. The field, orchards and gardens that surround the abbey gave it a neighbourly sort of look. After numerous additions and renovations, it belonged in its nook of Scotland. But it was hard to make out the Black Burn itself. I had to guess at its presence in a smaller wood beyond the orchard, between the abbey and the Elgin Road.

My gaze drifted higher, towards the far slope of the glen and rested on a patch of green above the tree-line. This had to be Thistle Flat where I’d first caught sight of Pluscarden Abbey on a similarly bright summer day eight years ago. I had travelled up from Dunblane to visit my friend, the writer and joiner Angus Dunn. After a cup of tea, and admonishments about my late arrival, he suggested we go on a wee tour. I had to walk fast to keep up with his new go-anywhere electric wheelchair, but after several hundred rough, grassy yards he spun round. The long sweep of Pluscarden Glen lay below us. Angus gestured toward the abbey and whispered me the story about how, a few short months ago, he’d strapped himself into the passenger seat of a two-person microlite and, minutes later, found himself flying low through the glen. A monk was busy in the abbey garden. Reveling in the near-weightlessness of flight, Angus yelled and waved at the monk, until the brother looked up, threw aside his hoe and waved madly back – sweaty, astonished and unmistakably joy-struck by such an unlooked-for visitation.

By the time Angus told me the story, he had no choice but to speak in whispers. Motor Neuron Disease had laid low his voice along with his body. But a good story was worth the effort, especially if it involved unlikely comings-together, when mystery met the commonplace, the sacred encountered the profane; when body and soul became bedfellows. The writer’s job, like the joiner’s, was to feel the grain of things, and evoke the happenstance of connection. In ‘Kernel’, the final poem in Angus’ posthumous collection High Country, he’s so entranced by the ‘acid orange streetlights’ at dusk, that they ‘release the taste of mango’. ‘What is it, after all,/but the taste of my life?’ Angus asks. ‘Unable to swallow it all/I blame the tightness in my throat.’

His throat certainly seemed tight up at Thistle Flat when he described the microlight flight. He died before summer ended. Now, in the summer of 2023, peering through the dense foliage of Heldon Wood, I couldn’t help but wonder if it wasn’t Brother Finbar who’d been busy gardening as Angus flew past. Why not ask him? I turned on my heels and headed back down through the trees towards the sunlit Abbey.

That evening, I found myself wandering through the little wood, south of Pluscarden Abbey, towards the Black Burn. I needed to discover for myself if it was a holy or filthy stream. Or both. In the end, I hadn’t asked Brother Finbar for more information about the burn. Nor had I mentioned Angus’ story. The idea that he was some kind of hoe-wielding Benedictine kindred spirit to Angus’ angel-impersonating joiner-poet, had taken such a hold in my imagination, I didn’t want it dashed by anything so trivial as the ‘facts’.

After a few minutes I arrived at the Black Burn itself. It was shallow, pleasant and entirely unspectacular. The only hint of drama came with a foamy riffling as it passed over some stones upstream. But it was serene. The sound of traffic on the Elgin Road, a few hundred yards away, was screened out by trees that overhung the banks, though I could just catch the day’s last birdsong as it merged with the breeze in the leaves and the quiet hum of the water. It all seemed one chorus, one chant, a gentler version of the plainsong of the monks I’d heard the previous evening, and the thought came that, right now, they’d be gathered in the chapel, the same sunlight falling through its windows, singing the office of Compline:

Noctem quiétam et finem perféctum concédat nobis Dóminus omnípotens

(May almighty God grant us a quiet night and a perfect end)

Maybe they didn’t need to invest too much faith in the waters of burn or spring when they had such a well of tradition to draw from. The ancient made new every day.  

But the burn sang a different song. Its waters were not an attempt to arrest time, but the voice of its flow, pitch and rhythm changing with the seasons – the vagaries of wind and rain, sun and ice. It was good music to listen to and a good place to be. I decided to take a video of this ordinary, tree-shadowed burn, retrieved my phone from my trouser pocket, touched the video button, and watched the Black Burn fill the screen. 

Suddenly the water wasn’t dark anymore, never mind black. It had been transformed from an earthy greenish-brown to a shimmering blur of blues and silvers, as dazzling as the scales of a leaping salmon. I tracked this impromptu dance of light up and downstream, but as soon as I pressed ‘Stop Record’ it disappeared. The burn was just a burn.

I pressed record again, and again the water seemed alive with light, but this time it wasn’t an image of salmon scales that came to mind, but the abbey’s stained-glass windows. The same radiance that gave the flagstones of the chapel the look of well-water, transformed the surface of the burn into a gallery of glittering windows. Was this some kind of miracle? Was I bearing witness to something divine? 

The thought lasted all of three seconds before another explanation popped into my head. My phone was cheap; so was its camera. It simply couldn’t cope with the vibrant interplay of tree shadow, stream and sunlight. I laughed – at my own foolishness, I thought – but when the laugh kept going, I realised I was laughing at the brilliant coincidence of ancient abbey, sunlight on water, and dodgy technology. And I imagined Angus laughing at such spontaneous joinery: a microlight and a monk, a dodgy camera and a sunstruck stream – the miracle of coincidence, the purely-by-chance gifts of a universe always on the move. Everything is real, one way or another. The trick, as Angus knew, is to notice the connections and write them down. To do the joining. 

I took one last look at the Black Burn and made my way through the evening wood back to the abbey, to its stone and song. 

Chris Powici lives in Perthshire where he writes poems and essays, often about how the human and natural worlds overlap. He is co-editor of New Writing Scotland and one of the writers behind Paperboats (paperboats.org). His latest poetry collection is Look, Breathe (Red Squirrel Press).