beginning with four lines from Taha Muhammad Ali
Poetry
Carol Tyx 3-01-2008
Like the iris
in the side yard,
I have stopped blooming.
Dig me up, O Spirit,
and split me; where I have grown
calloused, break me open;
Kathleen Hirsch 2-01-2008
I cannot tell you why
I taste death;
the cupboards
are reasonably
arranged,
the windows clean as rain.
Madeleine Mysko 2-01-2008
Before he was killed in World War I—tragically, just days before the Armistice—the poet Wilfred Owen wrote these words as preface to the book he never got to hold in his hands: “
Jasmine Marshall Armstrong 1-01-2008
The bough we clasped
while climbing towards
phantasmal blue
has broken—
we lie on concrete,
begging with a
shattered golden bowl.
while climbing towards
phantasmal blue
has broken—
we lie on concrete,
begging with a
shattered golden bowl.
Daniel Skach-Mills 12-01-2007
My breath pluming white into December
could, to God, be incense rising out
of the puffing thurible of my body.
Up here, it’s impossible to tell for the fog
Donald W. Shriver Jr. 8-01-2007
From far-out depths they come,
swell swelling swell,
'til cresting they salute the sky
and tumble towards sand that waits immemorially
to receive them.
Summer u
Murray Bodo 6-01-2007
As if it matters
- noticing the migrant workers—
- two to a wheelbarrow of concrete—
- mending the walls of the rich
- that exclude them
Byron Rempel-Burkholder 3-01-2007
This afternoon, sir
we nailed God down
He's at the back of the property
He's going nowhere, sir
His feet are stuck
to a block of wood
we nailed God down
He's at the back of the property
He's going nowhere, sir
His feet are stuck
to a block of wood
It's comical, sir
Edward A. Daugherty 3-01-2007
Common Life, Robert Cording's fifth poetry collection, is informed by religious faith and enacts it.
Deb Baker 2-01-2007
I went there once,
to the place you’re imagining.
It was purple, with wild geraniums
under green-bright stars.
All the constellations spelled
words, like &
Michael Borich 1-01-2007
After the olive groves at Samothrace and fog
which billowed up from a green sea,
the rocky sheep path and bleating ewes,
wind and sun—there w
Elizabeth Green 12-01-2005
Using the translated texts of sacred mystical poetry, David Wilcox and his wife, Nance Pettit, have created a recording of spare and intimate beauty, a product of evenings spent by the fire delighting in the words of ancient poets.
Linda Mills Woolsey 10-01-2004
At the regional airport in Waco, on the third day
of the war, we stand barefoot, as if on sacred ground.
As each in turn is beckoned, we file mutely past
the metal box that peers into our carry-ons and coats,
examines our watches, our wallets, our shoes.
Jene Beardsley 9-01-2004
"
as if religion were a state of shock,
deep, peaceful shock, that
men like these
are driven into by the spectacle of reality."
Peter Matthiessen in The Cloud Forest