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.
Poetry
Linda Mills Woolsey 10-01-2004
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
Ananda Robinson 7-01-2004
Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates. Outside are dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters.... - Revelation 22:14-15
A voice whispered in my dream:
Either you love or you're happy,
but never both.
I don't know how to live
without the dogs,
without faces writhing
in the bone-spurred night, bituminous
duels of prophets
and scoundrels, flayed
condoms in gutters,
without the infinite idols
to which we bow
in our desperation, shadow-dancing gods
that every day destroy
the city I cannot
live without.
Cynthia Gustavson 9-01-2003
Hundreds of years growing on a steep hill, desolate, aging / despite scarce nourishment, they wait for history to recognize them.
Joseph Ross 7-01-2003
Indigo true
purest blue,
a man on a cliff
waits with open hands
and closed eyes
to receive
a breath.
Kelly Sterns 7-01-2002
The summer God was nine years old
Heaven's swamp cooler broke for good.
His Mama was stout yet managed to scale
the side of their trailer, parked off a path
near the woods over by Gabriel's.
She jerry-rigged its fan to flutter
with the backing off her green and purple earring.
God was building insects that day
under the shade of the grapevines by the tree.
He pinched that colorful tool,
ran off for the quiet of his overhanging vines.
Easing the earring out of his overalls
he mimicked his Mama an historic way that day.
Rose Marie Berger 5-01-2002
I once met a woman who—
in a frenzy of wild praise
and to fight the devil—ate glass.