Amethyst Review

Grace Suffices
After an Observation by Wittgenstein

Does our weight rest on shifting ground
or hang by gold wires from heaven?
We work and sleep, a dreary round 
stumbling over shifting ground,
afraid to kick the gray walls down,
faithless to pray: may grace be given
to wrest our weight from shifting ground
and rise on gold wires toward heaven.

Herons on slick river stones
are my emblem. Unafraid of
falling or drowning, they leap into
the air and oar themselves toward home,
doing what I long to do
but lack the beating wings of love.

J.S. Absher has published two full-length books of poetry, Skating Rough Ground (Kelsay Press, 2022) and Mouth Work (St. Andrews University Press), winner of the 2015 Lena Shull Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. Absher’s poems have won prizes from BYU Studies Quarterly and Dialogue and have recently been published or accepted by The McNeese Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Tar River Review. He lives in Raleigh, NC, with his wife, Patti. (www.jsabsherpoetry.com/) 

The Twilight Language

Before the sun sets, the landscape grows dense
And darkens into ambiguity.

All objects take on a significance 
At once familiar and hard to see.

What we dismissed as nothing new or strange—
Trees, stone, moss, fences, sky, stars, grass, river—
Speak to our hearts in the twilight language.

The boundaries of our bodies quiver,
And we dissolve like raindrops in the sea.

A lightning flash illuminates the gloom
Of all our furtive, momentary dreams. 

The mudras of the pine boughs pierce the moon’s
Mandala and the mantra of the wind
Chants wordless tones that still the storm within.

Lee Evans lives in Bath, Maine in retirement from the Maryland State
Archives and the Bath YMCA. He writes poetry whenever he cannot resist
the urge to do so.

To Time

It was You, wasn’t it, on the mountain
when the wind stopped,

and my soul welled into the quiet
to roll with the peaks through the clouds?

When in the forest, I felt the earth
in my roots and the wind in my leaves?

You the tenderness in me for the finch
who no longer alights from the eave when I pass.

If all that exists matters, how does the river 
carry on with calm assurance

when most days the smallness 
of my understanding is my best hope?

I feel You unfold sometimes
like a purple flower after a rainstorm  

as the pines drip spicy gold
into beams of old sunlight.

Then I want to love my way to You
straight through this body

and this sacred ground,
like a river.

To touch petals and plant seeds,
hold hands and scatter ashes.

I don’t need to ask 
if You’ll have me.

Does the river ask the ocean
if it’s ok to come home?

Jenna Wysong Filbrun is the author of the poetry collection, Away (Finishing Line Press, 2023).  Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and have appeared in publications such as Blue Heron Review, EcoTheo Review, Wild Roof Journal, and others.  Find her on Instagram @jwfilbrun or visit her website: https://jennawysongfilbrun.wixsite.com/poetry.

Agitation Wave

Starlings fly in the physique
of a palm tree or hanging traitor
to avoid avian predators.
You hold back to catch them, en route
to the village. If a village
becomes disreputable, is it still the same village?

To avoid the predator miraculous,
the sorcerer love, ordinary townsfolk 
coalesced like raindrops into a dark cloud, 
mimicked their neighbours, acted out cruelties
they could not have perpetrated alone.
A predator scourged and speared.

How do you recognise the semi-transfigured
on the road home? At first,
you do not. You no longer trust love, 
do not believe it to be what you had. 
But when you see it, you desire it
more than you desire your own breath.

It is too late by then,
but you witnessed a miracle. 
And, now, here comes the murmuration, 
an abundant obscuring of all the light 
the sorcerer took with him.
Remember that light, how you bathed in it?

The road is dusty, your skin 
riddled with dust. Heart given, and purified,
you will always be clean.

Carl Griffin is from South Wales. His first poetry collection, Throat of Hawthorn, was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2019. His book-length poem, Arrival at Elsewhere, written for charity with the help of one hundred poets, was published by Against the Grain Press in 2020

I Cried Out to My God in an Empty Sanctuary


& I cried to Him & He didn’t answer,
crying out to my own echoes,
to a wooden cross high on the organ pipes,
overlooking the altar, the lectern, the pulpit,

once alive with sermon. Tears flocked
my horizon, argued with the emptiness.
I cried out again, the pit of my stomach huge
& filled with sorrow. I wanted

to say my heart ached
while my shoulders slumped,
& each time my hands trembled, I prayed:
Listen to me, I said, strained flakes

of whisper exhaling into the stained glass
windows filtering autumn’s generous sky,
a blade of sunlight hanging in the corner
of my eye. I am undone. The heartbreak

of all the yellow of what should be
untucked the light, & I exhumed
the heave & surge from the grave
of my chest until all at once it was quiet

& I was stilled. & as I let Him take me,
let Him lift me up, consume me
for that second, let light fall in, let His spirit
fill my mouth & air, let Him be the God for me,

I felt the moment for what it was—
everything—all I am ever meant to feel,
my yesterdays & tomorrows
not yet fogging up the windows

where I wait, this wintering making ghosts
of my breath while my body
fills with beautiful, boundless
certainty that tomorrow 

everything will change, & I thanked Him.
& we sat side-by-side,
drawing breath between our breaths,
a minute of wellness in my unwell world.

Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of four collections and twenty-one chapbooks, among others. She is founder and publisher of ELJ Editions, Ltd., a 501(c)3 literary nonprofit. She hopes you’ll fall in love with her words. 

Walking Madonna
		
			Elisabeth Frink, bronze, 1981, Salisbury Cathedral 


The mother of God walks 
	away from the cathedral   
away from the closed shadows 
of its interior 
into the open green
of the world outside

Despite the drag of the long skirts
she strides

Her thin arms swing 	
	empty now	
these arms that held 
the tender flesh of her child
	 measured his growing
helped to carry him 	
from his place of execution
	prepared his body for the afterlife

She is slight   small   
as she makes her way
into the light    
of a cold blue morning sky
	ready to face the hard business 
of resurrection

Beth Brooke is a retired teacher who lives in Dorset. She has three published pamphlets and one of those, Transformations, has been nominated for the PEN Heaney Prize. She has been published in a number of print anthologies and journals and several online journals including Amethyst. The most exciting thing about her is her beautiful grandson.

Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=138966572

Yesterday’s Making

At times, the colors
are slow to wake. He turns them over,
finds their edges with a brush, with a stone
and with the sun, prepares a space.
He lifts a canvas and, beneath a window
the threads of yesterday’s Making
are feathers in the dawn-light, minerals, and prayer, and dust
rising gold.
He listens to their memory.
He sings them back to the Maker, and waits.

Kimberly Beck: Kim is a quiet, listening soul, who lives in Washington State. She can often be found at a local therapy ranch, caring for a very special herd of Norwegian Fjord Horses. She believes that horses are some of the best teachers when it comes to listening and writing poetry. 

The Integrity of Doubt

There's nothing left but doubt
so do what you say and think
in the knowledge that it means
indifference is justified and you
must embrace the constant hum 
of anxiety and always question 
meaning. Disinformation has 
far-reaching consequences
so you are right to make use of 
it whenever you can. Commit
infractions, interfere, make use
of accelerometers and adopt
unethical behaviour. There is 
no question that AI is artificial 
and unintelligent; make sure
failure helps you win, seize 
every opportunity for religious
shenanigans whilst you cast 
the seeds of doubt. The truth
of something is always in
direct relation to its untruth,
to mystical revelation, visions,
poems, songs and inspired lies.
The world to come is only
for those who recuperate
enough to make the journey.
There can be no affirmation,
you must believe in doubt.

Rupert M 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)

My First Tree

The first tree I remember was a giant oak 
behind my boyhood home, 
the marker between the driveway and the garden. 

When I was six, I jumped and hung on the lowest branch, 
jumped up and down clinging to the spring of that branch 
hoping that I had the weight to break it. 

Our neighbor, Earnest Ozales, came and stopped me. 
He explained to me the tree was a living thing 
and the same way I didn’t want to be hurt it didn’t want to be hurt. 

He showed me the smallest twig at the tip of the branch
was like my finger, not to be broken. 
He had escaped the Nazis, was an arborist in Latvia. 

Now, every forest is my sanctuary, 
every tree is my upright companion,
pillars of praise to created mercy, 
the ground from which everything springs. 

Frank Desiderio, CSP, a poet, priest, and TV producer has served as a pastor, campus minister, retreat director and author (Can You Let Go of a Grudge, Paulist Press, 2014).  He produced the film Judas for ABC TV (2004) and several documentaries for cable television.  His poems have appeared in the Spring Hill Review, Windhover, Ars Medica, Moving Image: Poetry Inspired by Film among other journals. He and his sister, Mimi Moriarty, authored the chapbook Sibling Revery (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Currently he lives in Manhattan.

Pleshey

I
A large red-brick former convent - 
once belonging to the Servants of Christ -
sits behind a modest plastered farmhouse,
which is Georgian in style.
It is the large house, itself Edwardian
Arts and Crafts in style, - although the two 
buildings are connected, linked – 
to which we come.
Fringed with foliage and wild flowers 
standing spectacularly
tall and colourful, varied in hue.
Lawns – one with a labyrinth in bricks
laid into the ground, another with 
a large wooden inscribed cross
in front of which numerous
groups of ordinands have stood, 
together with bishops and retreat leaders,
prior to their ordination; I, being one such. 
A house steeped in memories.

A house soaked in love and prayer.
A house of retreat. Retreat not being
defeat, but renewal, refreshment
and revival. We come to drink deeply 
that we might live abundantly.
This place of memories containing
evidence of retreats past - sample, cross, 
notebooks – speaks of doors pulled shut 
for prayer; real communion
with God, such communion
as to make one more powerful 
in intercession, such self-loss in him 
as heals wounds by new contact 
with life and love. Blessed be God 
that he is God only 
and is divinely like himself.

II

Let our lives run to Your embrace 
and breathe the breath of Eternity. 
O God Supreme! Teach us to be 
more alert, humble, expectant 
than we have been in the past: 
ever ready to encounter You in quiet, 
homely ways. So fill our imaginations 
with pictures of Your love and 
make us ready for adventure 
knowing that beyond us 
are the hills of God, 
the snowfields of the Spirit, 
the Other Kingdom.
May the threefold rhythm of adoration, 
intercession and communion 
in which the spiritual life consists 
bring us into Your abiding presence 
and peace, as we are closely united 
with a world in torment.
As those who live very close to nature 
become tuned to her rhythm, 
and discern in solitary moments 
all the movements of her secret life, or 
as musicians distinguish each separate note 
in a great symphony and 
yet receive the music as a whole; 
so may we be sensitised to every note 
and cadence in the rich and intricate music 
of common life. May we, through 
our intercessions, stretch out 
over an ever-wider area the filaments 
of love, and receive and endure 
in our own persons the anguish 
of its sorrow, its helplessness, 
its confusions, and its sin; 
suffering again and again 
the darkness of Gethsemane and the Cross 
as the price of redemptive power.
Fulfil our sacred privilege to carry 
that world and its sorrow with us, 
and submit it in our prayer 
to your redeeming action. 
So, we cry, “Within Your wounds, 
hide me!” for all who suffer and mourn 
at this time. In every appeal 
to our compassion, every act 
of unselfish love which shows up 
and humbles our imperfect love, 
may we recognize you still 
walking through the world. 
‘Soothe our restlessness: 
say to our hearts “Peace be still.” 
Brood over us, within us, 
Spirit of perfect peace, enfolded 
in Your loving care. Blessed be God 
that she is God only 
and is divinely like herself.



III

The Archdeacon bows before the altar,
the ending of a Eucharist 
that concludes our short retreat 
as Area Deans at Pleshey. 
A blaze of colour and fire of movement 
on the altar frontal animates this 
simple, calm and holy space that 
resonates and reverberates with 
memories of training retreats, 
preparations for ordinations 
and cell group support in ministry.
I am here to the glory of God 
says the plaque in memory of
Friend of Pleshey, Evelyn Underhill. 
You are the salt of the earth,
the light of the world, says Jesus
in our Gospel reading. 
We are to bring out the different 
flavours in our communities
and illuminate the good
that is hidden and under-appreciated.
As Evelyn Underhill once said
God is always coming to you. 
So, gather yourself up and give 
your complete loving attention 
to something outside of yourself.
Meet and greet and receive them 
with gratitude. Blessed be God 
that they are God only 
and are divinely like themself.

Jonathan Evens is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord and a contributor to Liturgy on the Edge and Finding Abundance in Scarcity. His creative writing has been published by Amethyst Review, International Times and Stride Magazine. He writes regularly on The Arts for national arts and church media including Artlyst, Artway, Church Times, International Times, Seen and Unseen, and Stride Magazine. He blogs at joninbetween.blogspot.com.