Poetry
Illustration by Aldo Jarillo
My bones have been scraped
free of flesh, free of tendons,
muscles, veins—my heart is gone.
The marrow in my bones
is disappearing fast
and I am fragile,
dissolving into dust.
With a gust of wind
my cells could scatter.
Illustration by Maddie Fisher
It’s silly to call trees people
saying firs waving limbs are yelling at wind,
and cedars so tall their tops disappear
have heads in the clouds,
or to sympathize with plants below
ripening berries, sending out seeds
on wings while struggling for scraps of light,
and then feeding survivors of fires.
Silly. Better listen. Memorial
services have their ways of bringing up
Illustration by Hokyoung Kim
“Awake, awake …
clothe yourself with strength!”
—Isaiah 52
“What Really Happens When You’re in a Coma”
—Cosmopolitan (Feb. 5, 2019)
You dream I’m looking down on you
like a light on a ceiling
as though you are a thing
and I am a thing,
a light you aren’t,
shining down
on a body
you can’t escape
even in dreams, like this one
in which you dream
you’re awake, trying to awake
to the light that holds you together
Illustration by Mary Haasdyk
The chickens have a meanness I cannot quell
though I thunder from the kitchen window, a god
of rice and oats. No matter how much I scatter
in the cardinal directions, there is bullying,
the Silver Laced Wyandottes the worst despite their name.
Illustration by Owen Gent
Touch me and see, because a ghost does not
have flesh and bones as you can see I have.
—Luke 24:39
So easily startled by vastness, dark
distances, arrival, they were terrified by him
that night glimmering in their midst.
Jesus knew they needed to finger the familiar
relief of bones under warm flesh to believe
the body, pale star
studding their peripheral vision, a specter
rattling even Peter, who had seen the not-
ghost of him before, walking the sea. Jesus
knew their need to know he hungered, tasted
the tilapia baked in olive oil with salt, lemon,
tangy fingers to mouth.
Illustration by Ric Carrasquillo
the vast
and all its definitions had dumbfounded. I bit the hand
that fed imagination, took
for pestilence, the flies. For end-of-world, the gully washers.
I shook in handfuls
petals fetched from
doubt
Indefatigable, by Dave McClinton
The permanent shiny smudge replaced his bronze face,
his features fade in rusted pictures
I play with pigeon feathers picked from pages
on pulpit splinters that bear his cross of puzzled words.
Warriors unite rage, usher 10% offerings
to dear Black children morning, school wombs empty
Sheets untie laid to rest over waving hands
and church pews ready to fly away with sermons
The Tigris and Euphrates, which flow to the west of the estimated location of the biblical Gihon River, wind through the desert.
I am the angel who heard their euphony:
the Hebrew prophet’s words turning to
lamb
topaz on Ethiopian tongue, their voices
wedded together, gleaming
knife
beneath the desert sun. Imagine it:
you are Qinaqis, born beside
ewe
the Gihon River that once flowed from
Eden, marked for exile
mute
from family, from choice,
from even the faith
sheared
you one day will embrace,
despite your pilgrimage through
torment
the wilderness.
Lawrence Joseph during an interview in 2002 / Chester Higgins Jr. / The New York Times
HISTORY HAS PAID personal attention to Lawrence Joseph, a Maronite Catholic from Detroit. In 1967, when Joseph was 19 and just finished with his freshman year at the University of Michigan, his father’s grocery-liquor store was looted and burned during the Detroit Rebellion. The five-day uprising of Black people reacting in part to police abuse and brutality and its fierce suppression by law enforcement and the National Guard made him “acutely conscious of America’s deeply systemic violence.”
Joseph, a poet who was also a lawyer who taught at St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y., and at Princeton, was living a block from the World Trade Center in 2001 when the two planes attacked. He and his wife had to evacuate their apartment. It was weeks before they could return. In the title poem of his 2017 volume So Where Are We?, Joseph writes:
flailing bodies in midair—
the neighborhood under thick gray powder—
on every screen. I don’t know
where you are, I don’t know what
I’m going to do, I heard a man say;
the man who had spoken was myself.
Illustration by Colleen Tighe
Each word I choose
carries a different rucksack load for each of you
like I’m the fox slinking along rail lines
thinking by instinct & appetite & you’re
the commuter passing through
like I’m the moon whose same beams call
to a weeping child to a prowling owl
to shivering rodents in the grass
Illustration by Tiarra Lucas
I will teach you by the river,
I will name the place to meet,
how quick is the water;
I am the harvest: come gather and eat!
Illustration by Ric Carrasquillo
I’ve told you there are wolves out here.
Don’t you believe me?
You could fall in a hole
too deep to climb out of.
You could slip on wet rocks
and fall into the river and drown.
Good thing I noticed
your pink nose was missing.
Good thing I turn around
to check on what’s behind me.
Remember that leading the flock
I look forward to find tender grass.
Illustration by Islenia Mil
We wander round searching for demons
and making them of each other
when we find none. Out of feigned necessity,
the slightest difference becomes a reason
to tame—to vanquish—to stamp out until
we look up and catch sight of ourselves:
Illustration by Jon Han
OFTEN, WITH MEDITATION, I’m reminded of many people’s reaction to poetry. “I don’t get it,” they say, a little embarrassed to be admitting this to a writer and a former English teacher.
The first thing I think is: You must have had a really lousy teacher who taught you that poetry is something you “get”—a message you extract for a good grade. Poetry-phobes might feel a bit more relaxed when I tell them that’s not how poetry works. Often, with my favorite poems, I never fully get them. All I know is that reading and rereading them, the mystery stirs inside me again. In her lovely poem “Self-Portrait with Religion and Poetry,” Kate Daniels describes what happens to her when she deeply connects with a work of art:
... I lie down in the silence
of my mind and touch the world all over.
Clouds fly through me. Trees break the sky
above a frozen lake, and a footprint
startles its crust of snow.
Then I can type another page, or nurse
my hungry infant. I can take from the cupboard
the bread and the wine, the eggplant and garlic
my hands will transform into sustenance.
Illustration by Alex Green / Folio Art
If we believe nature will mend,
it will replenish what has been taken and,
answering the wild call of urban space,
dolphins will return to Venetian canals,
elephants will drowsy dream in Chinese tea gardens,
humans will shed their fear and guilt to hope and taste
the terror of responsibility
the terroir of ourselves
the terra ignota of a paradise where
Captured Behind Bars
Filmmakers in Iran risked arrest to help document Nasrin, a compelling portrait of Iranian human rights lawyer and political prisoner Nasrin Sotoudeh. The film highlights her activism and the power of the Iranian women’s rights movement today. Virgil Films.
Return to the Roots
Who Stole My Bible? Reclaiming Scripture as a Handbook for Resisting Tyranny, by Jennifer Butler, remedies authoritarian misrepresentations of the biblical mandate for justice. This practical guide dissects nine Bible stories and presents tools for embodying faith as liberation. Faith in Public Life.
Illustration by Ric Carrasquillo
I mispronounce my body as if
the architecture of the spine
were soft, as if this poem could
start here,
in the space between open lips,
even though it resists a title.
To be means to exist
with a name. To be means
to have a body worth defining.
Reading was the safest way to travel this year — sometimes to another decade and another brand of violence, sometimes to a different continent or a different galaxy altogether. Below are Sojourners' editors' favorite books of the year. Most of these books came out years ago, but by reading them through the lens of 2020, we found new wisdom, escape, resonance, and hope.
Illustration by Ric Carrasquillo
We shudder at the inhumanity,
the crafted cruelness of that sickening show:
the stripped humiliation, blasphemy
of beaten flesh, death’s agonies stretched slow
by fellow men created in God’s image,
turned terrorists, enslaved to sin’s strange fruit.
How could they mock the marred and lifeless visage
of God’s own child? His axe is at the root!
Illustration by Jia Sung
Call this hair crazy.
but watch as it grows
outside of your gates
and beyond the walls
you’ve made to contain
me. See as it reaches
higher than anything you
ever thought of me,
shedding every lie of
inferiority.