Nicholas Samaras, poetry editor for The Adirondack Review, lives in West Nyack, N.Y.

Posts By This Author

Instructions to the Monastic or the Pilgrim

by Nicholas Samaras 01-04-2018
A poem.

Enter this room and call it a cell.
Fold yourself and put yourself away.
For your whole life, you will be an amateur.
But be an amateur striving.
Enter this room and call it vigilance.
Make your ego the threadbare rug you walk on.
Before your quiet face, hold
the fane of your folded hands.
Fold yourself and put yourself away.
Become the parent to your parents.
Cast their names on the wind of your breathing.
Enter this room and be alone with dialogue.
Take the name of silence and let it speak.

Lent

by Nicholas Samaras 04-01-2009

How the earth now
struggles into spring.

How the cold hangs on,
each morning cracking to begin.