Poetry

John Gosslee 9-01-2009

The ram’s horn bellowed.
Fused with snapped spears and hatchet heads
nicked shields covered the field,

Nancy White 8-01-2009

that light kept me a year in its grip first
my feet caught fire then my blood
we moved at the edge of endlessness
headless handless mouthless mind-

Richard Schiffman 7-01-2009

To you who are lost today
like a needle in a haystack, reading this poem alone.
Alone, brother island, sister moon. The ocean is big,

Annie Deppe 6-01-2009

A grace of green, the underleaf
of olive, the birdsong’s
cradling. It’s as though

Nicholas Samaras 4-01-2009

How the earth now
struggles into spring.

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

Pamela Porter 3-01-2009
Five desert photographs taken by Thomas Merton.

Violet, whispered Eve, because
saying the names aloud

made the act too real. Pansy
and woodruff, the flowers so small

Jacob Bathanti 1-01-2009

Who am I to cast light upon the human soul?
Sitting down to write peace-verses for mercenary gain,
Hunting for poems and hoping against hope that I need not

Imperfection is the place where the spirit enters,
the small hole in your shirt, the loosening threads
of carpet, the ache in your soul for forgiveness.

Murray Bodo 11-01-2008

She consoles me as I meditate
before Mass—Julian of Norwich,
that is, who says, “We are clothed,
wrapped in the goodness of God.”

And she consoles me after Mass
when I drive home to the friary and
pass two prostitutes who are sitting
on folding chairs next to the curb
helping each other with makeup.

Chandy C. John 9-01-2008

Praise God for all things green

Lime jello, blades of grass, emeralds

Chameleons, the neon river frog

Heavy papayas begging to be picked

Carol Hamilton 8-01-2008

I expect the whitest dove,

purity as the Spirit breaks apart

firm blue of our ceilinged sky,

a tapered shape, an elegance.

But Picasso was right.

Louis Templeman 7-01-2008


She spoke softly, calmly recounting
her pain through a furnace of litanies
that helped her hold on to the unbelief

Kevin Hadduck 6-01-2008
I have seen that I must
Confess to ignorance

I do not know you, although
I have loved you twenty years

The lifting of your lashes
Ed Madden 4-01-2008
beginning with four lines from Taha Muhammad Ali
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.

The bough we clasped
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

The eightieth soldier was blown up in Salahuddin Province.