She pummels the ground, rakes, hefts
foot on shovel, slices the earth.
Her trowel unburies the root systems
of grass, clover, wild strawberries
pitching runners. She dredges for taproots,
plucks out invasives, sifts
clumps of clay, culling the rue
wild to reseed itself even
in rock. Into loam she combs centipedes
and snails, braids topsoil with humus,
laces the plots of tilth with seeds,
knowing the split seams will shoot
There’s a kind of visual poetry in Elizabeth Wrightman’s paintings—swatches of color, commentary, deep emotion, engagement. Sometimes this engagement is word with image, sometimes object and color with design. As they unfold, each scene—the burning bush, Jesus’ teaching on the lilies of the fields, the parable of the lost coin—seems given to us anew. Its recognizable elements unfold through new layers.
Already they have begun to fade away,
having resigned themselves to the nearness of death
and its bad habit of haunting parish halls.
Praise their unshakable faith in the coffee line,
the laden buffet, the table of baked desserts,
the power of food to gentle back into living
all those who mourn, and all their awkward neighbors.
Some bit of the universe is made less wobbly
by these, and by this school-lunchroom agape—
these, with their thinning, over-permed white hair.
May they go to eternal rest in flowered aprons.
Walking through Hoofddorp in the evening dusk
I pass a row of houses, brick and square,
each with a large plate-glass window exposing
a neat and tidy living room inside.
I heard somewhere the Dutch don’t draw their shades,
don’t close their curtains, even at night.
They need to show they have nothing to hide.
Three paintings, acrylic on canvas, of the prodigal son, the sower of seed, and the good Samaritan make up this triptych by Greek Cypriot artist Charalambos Epaminonda. He achieves visual unity among them using a language of gesture drawn from Eastern Orthodox iconography.
A tissue paper wind sock of a fish
Conjured this poem about fishes.
A mold, or a handmade painted dish,
Imagined a seascape of wishes.
So here is your poem of a fish
Not of a fish, but about one. It vanishes
Into the waves from the hellish
Heat to a white-wine sauce, a sprig garnishes
The sea bass or the grouper, a knish
On the side, or better, butter varnishes
The fresh catch (this is becoming a niche
Poem) and everyone relishes
The hurricane that buffets me
seems to have You battered in its stream.
Scriptures that grounded or buoyed
are torn asunder and spiraling to sea.
Incongruous snippets mock my need.
Instead of stilling the storm,
they tatter; their ink begins to bleed
long serifs from “Shepherd” and Peace.”
“Repent,” “Accepted,” “Judgment,” and “Mire”
wear cloudy, inscrutable feet,
and the Shulamite’s keenest desire
is now to make the shadows flee.
But that’s the point, I think—
Your name, fragile in the fury
In the opening sequence of the Netflix comedy series The Chair, Ji-Yoon Kim (Sandra Oh), the first woman of color to head the English department at a struggling liberal arts college called Pembroke University, makes her way across campus amid shots of ivy-carpeted walls and idyllic quads to the exultant strains of Vivaldi’s Gloria in D Major: “Gloria . . . Gloria . . . in excelsis Deo.” Glory to God in the highest.
With the world as they knew it gone, the characters remake the world from the resources they carry inside them.
“God in God’s essence is totally unknowable.”
—Ruth Burrows
St. Thomas More believed
the tale told of the miraculous
thorn of Rhodes which bloomed
a fresh rose every Good Friday.
So what if it isn’t true?
Everyone lives by a story.
The important ones are,
at heart, dark, mysterious.