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Artists like Cherith Lundin help you look at space and light differently. You begin to notice, for example, how light falls on white to create shades of pinky gray. “My work traces the architectural contours of everyday life in search of new ways of seeing, knowing, and imagining place,” writes the Minnesota-born artist, an associate professor of art at Wheaton College.

O they are happy and O they are loud!—
although only a saint, I suppose, could hear their singing.
Still, what a packed choir on this pie-shaped
piece of earth surrounded by traffic,
each chorus member craning toward me with
open-mouthed elation. I’ve written poems
about their kind, contemplative and lyrical, years ago.
This morning I want only to say
how glad I am to see them so glad.
Tiger lilies, you are as beautiful as ever,
and I am a year older, impatient as ever
and as hungry for praise. But you’re not interested

(Sarcodes sanguinea)

O snow plant, growing right and sudden
     in the middle of the trail,

O pulp-red flowers, bright as Christmas,
     O saprophytic explosion,

botanical grenade at my feet,
     is this what you do to gain our attention?

I see you near and far in the forest,
     shy to the ground but wanting everyone

to know that winter is leaving
     this bare stage, your pop-up art.

Seated before the woodstove,
bold tongues of fire licking
the glass door, I wonder
what it was like for the first
person to discover she had
the power to subdue the night
by striking two stones together,
sparking tendrils of smoke
to rise from dead twigs, grasses,
watching thin fingers of flame
quicken, flickering,
expanding.

A single lamentation, I’m done?
No, just a different one, to name the rains,

tintinnabulation at the window,
the bent lament of morning’s radiance

refusing to appear at this blue glass
where last night I could reach out, name the stars,

many, many my imaginations.
Where are the pearls you wore in your engagement photo

watching me from the piano as I pass by,
piano you played until the end, even half-blind.

These pearls—the girl who wore them stands right now
beside me, mere seconds, in this prayer-poem.

The devotional, political poetry of Barbara Crooker

The poetic language of Martin Luther King Jr. gave form and direction to the civil rights movement, and it has also given shape to many memorials erected in his memory. The national monument to King in Washington, D.C., erected in 2011, appears to be sliced from a granite peak, evoking King’s famous words spoken at the the nearby Lincoln Memorial: “With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” Recently, the City of Portland, Maine, an­nounced a competition to design its own memorial to King. Among the finalists is the sculptor Robert Katz.

Jess Row asks what happens when alienation turns to rage.

To the one I love, who played violin
and twirled your hair with gracious angst:
You pried clean off your grip on sin
to sing with far and wide and deep. And lost.

You didn’t realize black and white would blind
you. That Tchaikovsky’s music pours from light
despite vodka and trysts with men to bind
him. You’re either for or against the word of Christ.

The Rise of Skywalker reduces a powerful theological symbol to a family drama.