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The pond

Around the edge lace filigree shatters
at the slightest touch, shards scattering
like broken glass, but farther out the ice
is thick, immobilized by Arctic cold,
the weight of water, locked down,
trapped, mute as stone, the weight of
grief, immutable, the weight of fear,
impaled on the frigid air. Yet, even now,
beneath our sight, what was, and is, will
always be, the dearest freshness deep
down things where minnows glide and
water sings, the aquifer from which
life springs.

 

In church

Pew-bound at nine in a midwestern Black Baptist church,
I, whose childhood fidgeting was, in part, a longing for a wider world,
listened to the congregation of sisters and brothers humming.
They abandoned the well-worn words to the songs of faith
for the spiritual splendor of sounds welling up in human bodies,
sounds beyond or prior to soprano, alto, tenor and bass,
harmonizing melody and moan, connecting themselves to each other
and to their God, like electric current.

This Lent

Focus on the silences, this time around,
the changes in the light, the way
the sun breaks through,
and last night’s frost arrays itself,
the liquid shapes the ebbing tide creates
along the sandy shore,
a February wind cutting sharp
and clean across my tender cheek,
the warmth of scarves and gloves,
the winter gear.
And, every now and then,
those unknown folk who pass on by,
a nod, a smile, a wave, no more—but then
no less—and the way all this bears gratitude,
and even grace to life.

 

Moccasin

This is my body broken for you.

When I was twelve, I was baptized and had my first communion, leaving
me full of promises to be a better boy, starting with my kid brother, who
went with me the next day to spend two weeks with our favorite uncle
and aunt in their elegant new log cabin home above broad lawn terraces
leading down to a wide spill-water from the lake, which came slip-sliding
over the dam on to Georgia red, pink and gray shale feeding into a deep
wide creek where we again went fishing the last day of our visit.

Ten Commandments and a Question, by Joel Silverstein

Joel Silverstein’s paintings can be deadly serious and deeply funny, often at the same time. Immersed in comics from a young age and schooled in the pop art movement, Silverstein routinely smuggles comic book heroes and villains into paintings inspired by episodes from the Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition. Superman somehow feels right at home in the company of less literal luftmenschen, like the prophet Isaiah and the great Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

Epiphany

January 6, 2021

And so they rush the steps and bash the doors.
With windows smashed, the winter light breaks in.
Forgotten is the frankincense, the myrrh,
the gold the wise men brought. Instead, our kin

or neighbors storm the halls. We recognize
their faces, tense with hate. In different form
they look a bit like us. Yet we surmise
this mob that waves its flags, together swarms

A Doubting Thomas sort-of sonnet

Sometimes I think belief is obsolete.
                  The sky is empty. God does not exist.
That there’s no point to life, and wishing it
                  won’t make it true. That miracles and feats
arrive by way of science. Cures and healings?
                  Just suave doctoring. And soul’s a quick