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Hans Kung (1928–2021)

History, I repeat, will save us, if we honestly search for
Antidotes to restore our dying church. I’m spent.
No more catechesis, kerygma or impassioned speech left.
Straw? All straw? Maybe, but I refuse to accept the impending

Knell. Haven’t I too run the good race? Kept the faith
Under scathing scrutiny, escaped the ludicrous charges.
Now I endure the dark leap across. Eloi, eloi. Abba. You
Give me more time than I wanted. To study prayer. And pray.

A year since, I couldn’t find you—
“you,” that is, the hard bits,
the stardust and grit of you
left beneath the sparkleberry tree.

The find-a-grave app useless as memory,
the trail flooded, the guideposts
painted over.
It was terrible not to find you, terrible

until I did find you—
“you,” that is, your name
on the brass marker small as a leaf
in the end-up place
conserved for us.

Laquan McDonald, a Black teenager, was walking away from Chicago police in 2014 when he was shot 16 times by an officer, who was later convicted of murder on the basis of video footage suppressed by authori­ties. Jared Thorne’s photogram, produced from the autopsy report released by McDonald’s family, demands that we confront the palpable brutality of the young man’s execution. By shining a light on this diagram—and that of others like it, from the autopsy reports of other victims he includes in this series—Thorne illuminates the stark reality of being Black in America.

I want a sequel where they don’t have to hide their sexuality.

Spit in the face,
dust on the head—
we dread
such tokens of disgrace
and our mortality.
But when love blends
the two, the clay
in your hands
is why
we live. Mud in the eye
is how we see.

The friendly cellist with a big heart, a long-time resident
of a neighboring town where I grew up, who received
bouquets from the flower shop where I trimmed roses,
said his favorite thing to do after returning from a trip
was grocery shopping, savoring the essentials of small life
away from the airports and applause: buying milk, fruit
like blessings of solace: bread, tea, local honey in a jar
slow, lovely as sarabandes, those songs without words
aired in isolation through the pandemic. After his dose,

It’s not just about entertaining the kids.

I don’t know where the mind goes or how it keeps time—
the icy lichen on the bark over there can seduce me
even as I’m floating up to the dark bird at the top
of the live oak and looking down at poor earthbound me,
stepping over scat fresh on the path since yesterday.
This morning I feel alone and small—shrunken,
full of porous bone. I miss those inches I’ve lost.
To the east, the tick-ridden deer on the hill are silhouettes,
majestic and black. The doe reaches down to the fawn.

The poet’s collection of essays is so vivid, we can smell, hear, taste, touch, and see her rapture.

for Obi Martin

Mammoth mammon-caged gatherings
are happening elsewhere. But we are here,
where we can be counseled to lean toward
whatsoever things are funny, small, astonishing,
oblique. Once the alphabet was magic,
once the leaves spoke a language
the wise heard behind their eyes.

Once a strange hand fisted clay into birds,
and images slipped from one mind to another
like breath, like wind, like electrons
slipping inside the airy hearts of protons
and out again, shaking out their fur.