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A kind of tune

A kind of tune, a music everywhere
And nowhere. Love’s long lovely undersong,
A trace in time, a grace-note in the air,
Borne to us from the place where we belong
On every passing breeze and in the breath
Of every creature. All things hear and fear,
For faintly, through our fall, we too may hear
The strong song of the Son that undoes death.

Father Frans van der Lugt, by Jordan Denari Duffner

During the civil war in Syria, when many left the country to escape violence and hunger, Dutch Jesuit priest Frans van der Lugt insisted on remaining in the city of Hom, where he ministered to the disabled and to sought to foster harmony between Muslims and Christians. After a Catholic church was bombed, Father Frans asked the local imam to come to mass and read from the Qur’an. Soon thereafter, in April 2014, Father Frans was murdered. Jordan Denari Duffner uses the form of an icon to pay homage to him.

Barcarolle

The day I was confirmed, you turned to me,
sang out, while I stared straight ahead
through the sudden Wisconsin blizzard,

trying to keep our car on course toward home,
“Maybe this is why we got together.”
I thought that was too much hindsight, foresight.

Now, ten months into your death, our life
together winds and unwinds, spiraling,
snowdrifting, melting, freezing to melt again.

On the west wall of the room you smoked in,
coughed through, smoked, room I’ve had repainted
that blue the sky aspires to, our cross

The soul in paraphrase

A fledgling hidden in an ancient tree,
Singing unseen and darkling to the stars,
The fount and spring of meaning, just upstream
Of every utterance, unsullied, free,
A prisoner who grips and bends her bars,
The one who begs to differ, dares to dream,
A child astray, still calling to your heart,
A pattern, personal as all the swirls
In fingerprints on hands that hands have held,
Wholeness that knows itself within each part,
A flag whose emblem every breath unfurls,
A chasm bridged, and an old heartache healed,

The Celestial Ship of the North (Emergency Ark), aka the Barnboat, by Scott Hocking

Scott Hocking is equal parts scavenger, spelunker, and archaeologist. At the nadir of Detroit’s lean years, the artist began scrambling over walls and scuttling under security fences into abandoned factories in order to create mysterious, primal shapes out of refuse, using materials from concrete to polystyrene. In some instances, these forms remain in place, like ancient rune stones; others have gradually collapsed or been bulldozed by developers, leaving little trace.

Metamorphosis 7

Dearest instar,
Larva of my own heart,
You, who have never been comfortable in your own skin:
For days, I have watched you
gnawing your way through my garden,
stripping the milkweed down to bare stems;
sloughing off your former selves,
those old and outworn garments,
trusting your hunger, your devouring need,
to be your guide and strength.

Night rainfall

Letting down from the water-laden air,
the little fists of rain drum on
the skylight above our bed, imparting
their version of the truth of heaven.

I know that often the rain will
hold off, the grass darken and burn,
even the flies grow listless. And that too
is a half-heaven gift, calling us to be
more thankful when the heavy clouds
burst open over the fields, as a fresh and
fragrant cool sweeps in. We open our
windows. We breathe the change
that renews us.