Sorting by

×
Skip to main content
All Posts By

Nathaniel A. Schmidt

Nathaniel A. Schmidt is an ordained minister in the Christian Reformed Church and serves as a hospice chaplain. He holds degrees from Calvin Theological Seminary, Calvin University, and the University of Illinois Springfield. His newest collection of poems, Transfiguring, is available from Wipf & Stock, as is his first collection, An Evensong. He lives with his librarian wife, Lydia, and their daughter in southwest Michigan, meaning life is a perpetual story time.

-->
Poetry

Alert

Sitting in his throne of stone, cut from crags atop the world’s tallest mountain, overseeing all, the king-god breathed deeply in his lungs before exhaling forth a rushing word, what appeared to mortal senses like raging winds that carried thundercracks across the waves ...
Nathaniel A. Schmidt
January 18, 2022
Poetry

Striving

When the kitchen table becomes a confessional and the combat with demons in the heart hears conversation turn toward tired despair, How many more years, Lord?; I’ve tried to overcome, my spirit scrambles to defend motivation by considering itself a hero from Homer, say god-armored Achilles, some mother’s son once immersed in immortal streams who might famously vanquish the mightiest foes with a blade whetted true upon the Word and protected by a shield of faith, but then I remember…
Nathaniel A. Schmidt
September 1, 2018
Poetry

The Active Voice

After Camille Pissarro’s Haymaking at Éragny   Pissarro clumped, sculpted, plowed his oil paints to produce this hayfield: fertile pigments mixed, molded, together like squelching mud to cultivate such an agrarian landscape sown with greens, blues, yellows, browns; his passion raising pregnant berms with color on this canvas. Here, between trees, a breeze combs through wheat-sheaves where a woman works a pitchfork in the grasses, ordering, processing, a year’s plenty beside fellow peasants, harvesting what’s needed for unseen hungry mouths…
Nathaniel A. Schmidt
September 1, 2018
Grendel
Poetry

Transcription

Let us romanticize a monk, hunched-over, candle-lit, a sackcloth habit snuggled close to repel the winds besieging his abbey, medieval, dark, his stylus tracing pregnant sounds, presumably Latin, though perhaps Greek, Hebrew, some proto-dialect, or the heathen’s vocabulary in their stories he loves, Grendel, demonic, of the line of Cain, one tale redeemed by the one he believes which questions if Unferth, kith-killer, is beast or man. This ink stands opposite the page, black versus white, and yet our grey-cells…
Nathaniel A. Schmidt
October 31, 2015