Amethyst Review

Dead Sea Sparrow

Gray gobbler of dry seeds,
evolved to twist a Gordian nest
in a jagged crown of salt cedar,
unaccountably brash,
chitters bursts of psalm
from scrub tamarisk.

Its call of Tzip Tzip Tzip
pitches a promised land
to its own dun kind,
defies the real and present
risk of being cast out
of that acrid Eden

as wilderness, scorched
by pesticides, corrodes
into wasteland and countless
species are counted
down toward extinction–
from few to one to none.

A Nazarene child shaped
birds from sodden clay
and, holding those playthings,
blew on mudded wings
until the sparrows took flight
into an innocent sky.

Now these small messengers
cannot be conjured from earth
into the thin air of being.
Still, this one bird, clinging
to the cedar’s harrowed bark,
exalts its Shabbat song.

Note: In the gnostic Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the child Jesus clapped his hands to bring life to twelve sparrows he had formed from soft clay on the Sabbath day. The Qur’an 5:110 refers to Jesus breathing life into a clay bird.

Dan MacIsaac is a poet from Vancouver Island. Brick Books published his collection, Cries from the Ark. His poetry received the Foley Prize from America, and has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including, Stand, Magma, Agenda, Presence, and Homage to Soren Kierkegaard.

Intimations

It may be no more than the blackbird
singing in a hawthorn bush - as if 
he’d sung there forty years and never stopped -

the patch of reddened sorrel and dry grasses 
running behind a broken wall, abandoned coppice,
or the weathered gateway to a paddock

humped now in tussocks and tall burdock – 
edges of places, far up back lanes, offering 
half glances into what? – to following 

the margins of a stream, way-marked by willows 
down a fold of land, to where it sinks 
in a sump of bulrush and bright kingcups, 

or of foraging the hedgerows, looking 
for nests, wild fruit, gathering bunches 
of shy flowers now protected by the Law?

And sometimes, coming through the strip 
of woodland, there is a stile set in the fence 
ahead, sunlight on open fields beyond,

the back-lit branches drawn aside like curtains 
round a stage-set, picturing a promise 
brighter than real life ever could fulfil.

Tony Lucas is retired from parish ministry but continues with work of editing and spiritual direction. His poetry has appeared widely on both sides of the Atlantic. Past collections, including Rufus at Ocean Beach (Stride/Carmelyon) and Unsettled Accounts (Stairwell Books’) remain available. He is a long-term resident of South London.

Finding Space

on days when noises
fly in my face
like a murder of crows,
cawing and squawking,

when movements
flash around me,
disco balls slicing
every optic nerve,

when a touch
feels like spider webs,
and I propel both arms
in windmill defense,

I want to float,
to curve my body
like a spoon
against the dark side

of the slivered moon,
take measured breaths,
explore the silence
like one explores

the space left
by a pulled tooth,
close my eyes,
and drift into the abyss.

Arvilla Fee lives in Dayton, Ohio with her family. Her passions are writing, photography, and traveling. Arvilla’s works have been widely published in both national and international presses, including Tipton Poetry Journal, October Hill Magazine, Rye Whiskey Review, Snakeskin, Rat’s Ass Review and others. Her two published poetry books: The Human Side and This is Life can be found on Amazon. Her third poetry book is Mosaic: A Million Little Pieces. To learn more, visit her website: https://www.soulpoetry7.com

After Long and Slowly Burn

After long and slowly burn
the violet and final black,
blaze the white of early turn
of year; floweret where yet lack

leaf and vine, the green deferred.
Dazzle light in lengthen day
so banish dark where song of bird
shall not ring, and rise the way

of sun in sky; shadows will flee
underfoot, so trample down
the dark. Petal and song agree:

birth redeemed, and all the ground
in light transform. The many shades
reunite, and sky remade.

Connor Patrick Wood is a poet and Substacker (https://cultureuncurled.substack.com) in Arlington, Massachusetts. He holds a BA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in religion and science from Boston University. Before he left academia, Connor’s research on the cognitive science of ritual was funded by the John Templeton Foundation. He has published poetry at the Rabbit Room Substack, Ekstasis, and elsewhere.

Mourning Dove

Somehow, your song
is softer, even
than the taciturn shade of your feathers
as they return to your sides, on folded wings.

And somehow, your eyes
are the eyes of a sage, warm
and watered, and closed
above the ink-dark band of your clerical collar.

You are bowed above me, on the branch of a tree
that was not supposed to live.
Its tender arms
are steeples in the dawn-light, and you
are a prayer.

Kimberly Beck is a poet from Washington State. She can often be found at a local therapy ranch, caring for a very special herd of Norwegian Fjord Horses. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Solid Food Press, Ekstasis Magazine, and Clayjar Review.

Psalm 113

If walking could cure troubles, 
if each sandprint truly erased a wave, 
then, in one week, we walk off a century. 

Before dawn, crystal jellyfish wash ashore. We step aside, in step. 
At dusk, a blue sun umbrella bobs along the beach, looking for its mate.
At blazing noon, we are hand in hand while the dog circles ghost crabs. 

At sea level we walk, lifted high.
Tearsalt evaporates, maybe forever.

                                      small sandpiper
                                      large sea
                                      God’s sun, God’s whole heaven

Megan Willome is the author of Love and other Mysteries, a poetry collection inspired by Song of Solomon and the Mysteries of the Rosary. She has also written The Joy of Poetry, a memoir, and Rainbow Crow, a picture book. Her day is incomplete without poetry, tea, a song, and a walk in the dark.

Spring Tea

slowly
            the pond woke
to spring

Midori knelt
in her flowered kimono
with its tight, white obi
and measured 
the value of silence
from a bamboo dipper
over powdered green.

Tell me more.

enough  enough

Anita Pinatti is a native New Englander, amateur photographer, and a late-bloomer who began writing poetry in her late-fifties along with a meditation practice. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals including Earth’s Daughters, Evening Street Review, Glimpse, SALT, and Vallum.  

Transit

Love tells you you are everything,
as the mystic says,

but the universe says you are nothing.	
How can you persist this way,

a stalled cloud?
How can you know 

if anything too large to measure
deserves to be called real?

That goes equally
for the very small,

not just the quanta,
but whatever keeps us going,

the spark we keep seeking
not knowing

if it’s large or small
and what we can use it for,

in love or pain.
 

Stan Sanvel Rubin’s poems have appeared in many US journals including Agni, Poetry Northwest, Georgia Review, One, and in Canada, China, Ireland, and Belgium as well as several anthologies. He has published four full length collections including There. Here. (Lost Horse Press) and Hidden Sequel (Barrow Street Book Prize). Born in Philadelphia, he lives on the north Olympic Peninsula of Washington state.

A Mere Crumb

The host presents itself but once a month
full and round
a complete image
and then on other days
it is but a fragment,
but we have always known and were always taught
that in the fragment
we find there the whole 
in its entirety complete
the mere sliver notwithstanding.

Margaret Taylor-Ulizio is a canon lawyer, part-time Religious Studies instructor, and novice writer. 

Wholly Spirit

One tale from so-called Scripture daunted me 
as deeply as a passage from the Tao
until I learned that Myths, like poetry,
use metaphor to help a mind grasp how

one God, or The Divine Soul, from some Higher 
Realm, or Heaven, thought of as above,
descends, from time to time. One Way is Fire.
Another, paradoxically: The Dove.

A forest burned makes fertile soil, however,
as does volcanic ash when cooled at last.
And after World War One, the world said never
again, as some, after The Holocaust.

Some, not all. Is The Dove returning, then?
Or will The Flame be visiting again?

James B. Nicola is the author of eight collections of poetry, the latest three being Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, Turns & Twists, and Natural Tendencies. His nonfiction book Playing the Audience: The Practical Actor’s Guide to Live Performance won a Choice magazine award. He has received a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, Storyteller’s People’s Choice award, one Best of Net, one Rhysling, and eleven Pushcart nominations—for which he feels stunned and grateful. A graduate of Yale, James hosts the Writers’ Roundtable at his library branch in Manhattan: walk-ins are always welcome.