A New Poem I love a new poem that I must read over and over. First run is a foreign language, but as I go through the words one by one— turning them over and over, weighing, measuring, giving them the tender respect they deserve—then the phrases, metaphors, similes, word spacings, and stanza breaks, it…
Category: Poetry
Peering into the Dark
Peering into the Dark Friends and family line up orderly, row by row, to pay respect to the widow’s dead husband. Each peers and pauses with reverence. But the corpse is a mirror, reflecting every mourner’s face. That glimpse into the grave is deep and dark and universal, but only for a second. You can’t…
Barely Smelling Bacon
Barely Smelling Bacon Out on the lake’s edge in the blackness of a remote mountain cabin, she sits straight up in bed peering into the dark and blinking to see better. A creature is shuffling on the rocks outside, rummaging, and brushing against the outside log walls. Then scratching, is it the sound of claws…
Love and Beauty
Love and Beauty How we yearned for the earth to release, to let go its weightless gold and allow the revelation to fill our souls. And suddenly it bloomed, parchment leaf by parchment leaf shimmering in the light until our whole world brimmed with the treasures of unfolding fall. In those sweet …
Canyon Carvings
Canyon Carvings What words are carved of You Oh, Ancient of Days across these canyon walls? I see You, think if You, yearn for You in every crevasse. What is Your Name? What motivates You? All this glory around me tells me a story about You. But as it turns out, this is my story….
Extraordinary
Extraordinary There isn’t an eagle’s feather, pine needle, or postage stamp of sky that doesn’t silently shout extraordinary lengths— in this extravagant showcase of quaking life. It became necessary to span the distance between God and humankind. Our cosmos is a fading fragment of the unapproachable light in which He dwells. We…
Stuck Here
Stuck Here Sitting on the weathered front porch and watching the placid lake splayed before me in splendor and the dense, heady evergreens towering heavenward, I hear the wild geese honking and smell the pine. The morning sun scrubs my face with light—the kind that seeps to the bones and provides a certain depth…
The Flood
Painting by Liam Rainsford The Flood Yesterday’s burdens weighed you down — too heavy for the long road as they gathered in the corners of your heart. Let the blueness of that wound you bear today become a scouring tide; let it rise and wash away winter’s broken, brown debris. Let the tears flow, let…
Bonnie Saul Wilks 