All Posts By

Nathaniel Schmidt

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…
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…
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…
Poetry

Profession

After Job 13:15 “Though He slay me, still will I trust Him,” seems a rhetorical boast, easily made, for who can comprehend this claim’s worth when even at funerals, death remains abstract? Yes, a tangible corpse lies stiff, dressed, and…
Poetry

Romantics

He loosens his work-tie’s noose-knot, ascending a staircase climbing above our grey earth, fallen leaves clotting gutters in the car-park where a divorced neighbor, half-lifed, drags on a cigarette, smoldering time until her bed-mate’s pickup returns, a faded T-shirt her…