Amethyst Review

The Path for Me?
 
In the hall are twenty devotees, a terrier
and a mongrel.
 
A smile greets when I hand in a quiche lorraine
for the potluck meal; blank faces disappoint
 
when I tell them I've been exploring Theravada.
A volunteer lights incense and candle then invites the bell.
 
We recite ‘The Community’’s version
of the five precepts. I’m too shy and dodge
 
my turn; say I’ve forgotten my glasses.
Walking meditation makes me self conscious
 
and feels strange. After a blessing,
we savour lunch in silence.
 
Some of us take a walk through the village,
over a bridge, down a lane and back.
 
As we do so, we talk and talk;
released from silence.
 
One serene follower sits cross legged
on a mat, peels and eats a banana
 
before the dharma talk on mindfulness.
After which, I still don't know what it is.
 
 

Terry Sherwood lives in Northamptonshire, England. A former painter, his creative outlet is now poetry. His poems have been published in Allegro, Acumen, Orbis, Pennine Platform, The Cannon’s Mouth, The Ekphrastic Review and The Seventh Quarry amongst others.

Stone

I am soaring miles above the earth.
Below me,
the smooth surface of the precambrian shield
is flowing like a river.

Water snakes and winds around bedrock.
Vast swathes of forest and wetland
are changing shape,
dancing with the living granite.

The stone tells me:
“Everything good lives on forever in spirit
and returns to the Earth when it is ready.”

I wake and remember Kateri,
their hand on a boulder,
saying, "This is the speed
at which Spirit moves."

Silas Foxton is a tattoo artist and community worker meandering around the great lakes basin. Their work picks at a simultaneously strained and reverent relationship to land, ancestry, and identity which draws on experiences of dream life and things only seen out of the corner of one’s eye.

Dominion

is not exploitation’s synonym,
reason’s rationale for ruined resources,
permission to pursue people as assets,
a commandment to act as God.
 
it calls us to be
secure in our skin
so others can be in theirs,
acknowledge that abundance means
enough for all not more for me,
understand equality and equity
are not the same,
see the forest and the trees,
know the village it takes is lifeless
until we dwell in it.

Duncan Smith grew up on a farm in southeastern North Carolina in the 1960s in one of the nation’s historically poorest counties. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A public librarian who started a database company, he published his first poem at the age of twenty. Decades later he published his second poem, reclaiming writing and poetry as a long-lost and recovered passion. Duncan’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming in BRILLIG, Broad River Review, The Crucible, Kakalak and online in North Carolina Literary Review, Red Eft Review, Table Rock Journal.

Waiting Hours

This month, there has been no revelation,
no miraculous sign, no sudden turn.
The earth spins slowly and my poems end
without the Spirit stealing my pen.
He does not work the same way twice, I know,
and still, the ache for Him to work at all:
I know You could heal me if You gave me the words.
I know what it feels like to be surprised.
I read once of a type of bamboo that, once planted,
didn’t show a sprout for three years. In a day,
it grew straight into the sky.

Elle Rosamilia grew up in upstate New York, moved to Mississippi for college, and spent the next three years teaching English in North Africa and studying theology in the UK. She currently lives in Pennsylvania, where she can be found reading poetry on her lunch breaks and writing in the pockets of free time she has amidst her retail job. Her latest poetry collection, The Mourner’s Almanac, explores seasons of grief and hope, and she has poems published in Prosetrics and Vessels of Light.

Nam Myoho Renge Kyo

I chant it, breathe it, or just think it
sometimes when I’m feeling anxious,
that little Japanese mantra I was given
by a friendly young woman
on the subway the spring I hitched to New York
on my way to Europe.  I was fresh off
the road, heavy backpack, new hiking boots,
I’m sure had out-of-towner written
all over me.  This woman — I remember
she was short with wavy sandy-colored
hair — brought her face close to mine and said,
“This will help you to center,” and
wrote it so I wouldn’t forget.  I was
lonesome but hopeful that year in the last
days of my twenties, discovering
I could open the door of Nam myoho
renge kyo and find reservoirs of calm.
Nichiren Buddhist, translates variously
as Glory to the Dharma of the Lotus
Sutra and I take refuge in the Lotus
of the Wonderful Law.  I relied on it
camping in bushes beside the autobahn
or trying to sleep in a seedy
hotel room in Milan.  Even now when
troubles worry me awake, I breathe in
Nam myoho and breathe out renge kyo
thinking of that time when I was lost
and trying to find the way back to my life,
and I thank that woman who pegged me for
the worried pilgrim I was on the New
York subway and gave me the sublime gift
of the Lotus of the Wonderful Law.

Thomas R. Smith is a poet, essayist, editor, and teaching living in western Wisconsin. His most recent book of poems is Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications). He is the editor of a forthcoming collection of Robert Bly’s essays on poetry and the writing life, The Garden Entrusted to Me (White Pine Press)

Museum of Trees

Finish every day and be done with it - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let yesterday, all yesterdays
go into your museum of trees
some verdant, some burnt. 

Sure, you may smell the smoke
of tamped down desires,
and, yes, the leaves constantly
 mutter nonsense as if they had regrets.

The broken branch 
crashed to the ground
but it missed you, move on. 
The autumn fall of forgiveness 
softens the forest floor. 

The constant burble of the stream
wants to hold you
ease you with cool touching.
Slights and insults roll over the rockslide, 
slick from years in the stream,
swallowed in the white water roil. 

Leave the snapped twigs behind
under a loamy mound. 	
Yes, there are also the mounds
marked with stones
some heart-shaped, some a cross, 
some an X. 
Pray your prayer and make progress. 

Rain rinses everything clean. 
Rise and begin serenely again
lift your mug heavy with coffee
give thanks
all you need for happiness is here 
in the clearing of your morning vision. 

Frank Desiderio is a priest and poet who served as a campus minister (UCLA), retreat leader and film producer. Now, he produces two video poems each week on his Substack, Holy Poetry, https://holipoetry.substack.com. His poems have appeared in the Spring Hill Review, Amethyst Review, America, Windhover and Presence among other journals. Currently he lives in Manhattan and finds joy in helping to raise his nieces, writing poetry and doing Tai Chi.

 The Monks of Skellig Michael
                                             (Ireland, 6th Century)
 
I'm with you always, till the end, You said.
I look for You in desolation, high
between the sea and sky and, living dead
to world and self, transmogrify
to something less or more than merely human.
My minutes, hours, days are tolled by breathed
novenas, heaven's furious sun and rain,
sweeping waves of screaming sea-terns weaved
through cloud-thrown tapestries of light and shade,
and constant sea-borne bass of boom and rush.
I feel You in the rote of night and day,
and hear You in the deepest evening hush.
 
The last west rock before the endless sea,
from Skellig's crags they glimpsed eternity.
 

Greg McClelland is a retired federal government attorney. He has written poetry throughout the years but has only made a concerted effort to publish it since retiring in 2013. He has published poetry in Ancient Paths, The Road Not Taken, and New Verse News. He has one Pushcart Prize nomination.

Revelation 2:17

What if an incantation of animal names
was the only necessary magic?

What if freedom fell from hearing 

Dove
Vole
Horse
Tortoise
Grouse
and
Heron?

What if midway through
our recitation we
discovered ourselves
outside
the locked gates:

Mortgage
Degree
Buy
Entertain
and 
Hurry

What if through the deer’s leaping white like a 
flame, the fox’s laugh in autumn,
the call of the barred owl reminding
us of death’s slow approach we
knew ourselves again?

What if we plunged our dusty hands into the
river of what is given and pulled
from her a stone, white, which
when turned revealed our own
forgotten name?

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.

One Hundred Things

It’s a ubiquitous kindergarten tradition:  Collect one hundred things for the hundredth day of school.  But Gwyn’s disinterest creates yet another mother-daughter struggle.  Counting elbow noodles is boring.  Stringing beads is stupid.  I look at our dining room table, messy with paper, pencils, and scissors, and suggest, somewhat deviously, “Gather up your paper dolls.  I bet you have a hundred.”

Her eyes brighten.  The table clears while paper dolls, ten in each row, get into marching order on the living room floor.

Gwyn began coloring paper dolls at age four.  At first Emily or I outlined the body for her; then she learned to sketch her own, coloring in skin, face, hair.  We were perpetually cutting out arms and legs and whole wardrobes, each tiny shirt and skirt bristling with flaps.  When Gwyn started therapy for adoption-related struggles, the first thing she did was draw our liberal Christian family with matching skirts, shirts, and hijabs.  When Gwyn read that Betsy and Tacy cut their paper dolls from magazines, advertisement models toting oversized cell phones and wine glasses began littering the living room.  Family started giving her store-bought sets, paper mice holding dandelion bouquets and Frida Kahlo with her amazing wardrobe and, later, Hamilton, cocky with his hand on his hip.  These delighted Gwyn for a bit, she dressed and sorted them, but her ardor for her own designs always won out.  There’s the Christmas set with Mr. and Mrs. Santa and elves, a set for Disney’s Frozen movie with accurate replicas of Anna and Elsa’s dresses, the “Mama, Imma, and Gwyn go to Hawaii” set with hula skirts and volcano-proof suits, and even the God set.  The divine family has strangely enormous heads and stick bodies.  Sister God has cornrow braids, Baby God is still crawling, Grandpa God sports a gray beard.  “The whole world’s a family,” Gwyn tells me, and she draws and draws, trying to find her place in it.

Once after I’d been away on a three-day silent retreat, Gwyn greeted me at the door with a large manilla envelope on which she’d scrawled, “Open Immediately.”  Gwyn and I sat on the back hall steps, our sides pressing, my arm around her.  Inside were Gwyn, Imma, Mama, each with a few outfits in our favorite colors, matching pajamas, and crowns.  I couldn’t stop squeezing her into me.  I imagined her all weekend bent over the dining room table, pouring ache into little flat people she could give hair-dos and tenderly clothe, all the while I’d been pouring my ache into the silence, and it seemed to me that prayer is never what we think it is.

We collect paper dolls from dresser tops, book shelves, and under beds, laying them in a battalion on the living room carpet:  Ninety-seven, not counting clothes or vehicles.  Gwyn tackles the final three with gusto.  Once their classroom appearance is complete, we will store them in a large gift box in the basement.  Sometimes while I’m working I will imagine those paper people resting in the dark like a secret population of Gwyn’s longings, while her love marches mightily, invisibly, into creation.

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is the author of Swinging on the Garden Gate: A Memoir of Bisexuality & Spirit, now in its second edition; the chapbook Map to Mercy, and three books on writing: Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir; Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice; and The Release: Creativity and Freedom After the Writing is Done. She is a founding member of The Eye of the Heart Center, where she teaches writing as a transformational practice and hosts an online writing community. You can connect with Elizabeth at www.elizabethjarrettandrew.com and www.spiritualmemoir.com.

autumn breeze through the heart chakra

a gust of desire
for something eternal
flung open all these windows
inside me

exposing that place
that holds up the lungs
you know, the place where
fire is compressed into a point

and suddenly, the point
bounces forward
turns cool and hollow

a dancing tunnel of morning light
with autumn leaves floating upwards!
no two leaves ever identical

Shelina Gorain is a former software professional, a balcony gardener and a knitter. She writes from Toronto.