Recent Poetry
Thoughts on the Afterlife
Driving home Friday I pass a man
mowing the grass
in front of a small blue house
just north of the morturary--
a dead ringer for my dead
colleague, David, professor
and fomer chair
of the department of theology.
By the time I turn down Evans
I'm wondering what if it were
really him, an eminent liturgist
spirited back one hot afternoon
in August to be a procession
onto himself, straight row up
and straight row back, no music
but from the mower, no incense
but the smell of fresh-cut grass.
What a blessing it would be
to break a sweat again--
to dwell again in the ringing
of that inaudible bell when
the mower quits--it makes me
think the afterlife might not be
so bad if once in a while they
send us back do do some odd job.
Then I remember those refugees
from high school who come back
to watch the homecoming game
they starred in the previous year--
how lost they look in the twilight
beyond the end zone with no where
else they'd rather be.
John Ruff
Winter 2008
Not Necessarily Another Angel Poem
I've been trying to bring the hummingbirds close,
Trying hard to train my eyes to see their wings as wings
Instead of movement, trying to be still enough to
See that quickly. Just in case. I'm meditating
On some flower-shapes and bright glass pears
Inverted so that sugar-water hangs suspended,
Singing out to needle-mouthed bits of colored speed,
"Come drink! Come lick the hovering sugar!
It's just your flavor! Just for you, you, you!"
And I've been thinking how to train myself to
Sit so still and think such sweetness that
The needle-tongued and blur-winged things
Might light on me.
Devon Miller-Duggan
Autumn 2007
Feast of the Epiphany
That town along the tracks where trains no longer stopped
had more bars than churches, but everyone kept Christmas
so on January sixth, a day most of us could not name,
volunteer firemen gathered at the playground to receive trees,
our own and those begged from neighbors. A branch
in each mittened hand, we'd drag them through the streets
to the place where men in helmets and thick, complicated coats
bent to bestow one new year's dime for each brittle tree
they'd take and hurl into the blaze. Now we might ask where
the mothers were--home, fixing dinner, fathers on the road--
but have I told this well enough for you to hear the conflagration,
hot and loud as a locomotive, for you to see the sparks spray
in great arrays against the night? There could have been a war
somewhere or mills closing, but those men--faces painted
with flames--did not resemble neighbors or uncles of school mates
that night. Walking, cold and tired, into the rest of winter,
a child could be light with dimes and lead tinsel in her pocket,
pine needles splintered in her snow boots' fleece.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf
In Summer 2007
Stilled
I must learn
the calligraphy
of egret stance
poised on a word
that lies beneath
the weaving current,
steady, still.
Nancy Compton Williams
In Spring 2007
Sabbath Poems: X
How can we be so superior to our forebears?
The truth will never be complete
in any mind or time. It will never
be reduced to an explanation.
What you have is only a sack of fragments
never to be filled: old bones, fossils,
pieces of writing, sprawls of junk.
You know yourself only poorly and in part,
the best and the worst maybe forgotten.
However you arrange the bits, authentic
and random, a fiction is what you'll have.
But go ahead. Gather your findings into
a plausible arrangement. Make a story.
Show how love and joy, beauty and goodness
shine out amongst the rubble.
Wendell Berry
In Winter 2007
Words
The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.
And one word transforms it into something less or other--
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.
Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper--
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.
The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always--
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.
Dana Gioia
In Autumn 2006
Lemon
The pebbly map of its thin skin,
the pith, the thick walls,
the tough little seeds.
It needs to be married
to sugar, white beach sands.
My mother and I are pretending
we're at the shore, sitting
on the patio of her nursing home.
A yellow raft sails off on a sea of cold tea--
The citrus light of summer
washes over the moonbeam
coreopsis, the lemon lilies,
sundrops, button headed daisies--
My mother is saying goodbye
In many little ways.
She has held her first great-
grandson; his skin's tender as a peach,
while her hands, gnarled by arthritis,
are trees left unpruned in an orchard gone wild.
O holy church of the lemon, chapel of wedges,
acidic juice, the slick shine--how the oil
clings to your skin, lingers on your fingers,
blesses the flesh of fish swimming in the plate,
kisses the filling of pie on the shelf,
remembers life is bitter,
remembers life is sweet.
Barbara Crooker
In Summer 2006
Pillar of Salt
It's not rain but fire
in the clouds
builds up
to a hard quick anger
until the edges
of my eyes
burst
and flames
peel back layers
of blue to red
the sky breaks into
the sand melts under
me. Don't look back
your voice burns
in the mountains
ahead
but I turn
to other gods.
Marci Rae Johnson
In Spring 2006
Dangling
When I believe I have no needs I cannot fulfill,
When my lies sound like truth,
And when I've added yet another self
To my fabrications, I contemplate the life of a monk
On Mt. Athos who ties one end
Of a rope to a cypress, then loops the other
Around his chest and walks off the cliff where he lives.
Lord, you are my stronghold, he prays, dangling
A few hundred feet above the darker water
Where the bottom drops off. I suppose
It's a way of restoring the grace
Of insignificance, as he hangs between the sky
Where gulls spin around his head, held up by air,
And the sea where waves break apart on the rocks.
I like to think my thinking is a form
Of spiritual exercise, but I never reach that moment
Of unburdening when the monk feels at ease
(or so I wish), free now that he's tethered
Again to God, when he needs nothing
That is not provided by the sea floating up on air,
Its scent alone like the taste of the richest oysters.
No, for me, each day's fresh start points only
To the tree, the rope, the cliff-edge and sea.
And the going over, again and again.
Robert Cording
In Winter 2006
You Went By
While flying
to the next minute
things forgot
how to obey
gravitational force
in their natural
fall
to earth.
They froze.
And neither did I eye
any bird,
any waterwave
or breathe my
own breath
as you went by.
Camelia Luncan
In Autumn 2005
Meeting
The first day, I am late.
Metal on wood the latch falls
into that silent place.
I can't sit still the endless hour
on the hard gray bench,
can't mediatate,
just keep wondering am I home
or is this just another stop
to rest my shaken spirit
that slipped out of place--
when? Feels as long ago as when
that handmade glass was placed
to filter light into soft gray ripples
on the plain meeting house wall,
like tears that blur the face
you gaze and gaze at.
At last a man speaks. His face
from last night's dream: Grandfather
in an old house; big pot simmered on the stove
children offering me food from a full plate.
D. Nielsen
In Summer 2005
Questions to Tammy Ditmore (tammy.ditmore@pepperdine.edu)