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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.

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Job Rebuked by his Friends
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 prone in a woodcrafter’s pride, next hoisted by dove-feigning fingers in soft cotton gloves onto broad shoulders, who then carry this cross out to the hearse, to the church, to the earth, where, seed-like, it is planted, expecting a glorious…
Nathaniel A. Schmidt
October 31, 2015
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 smock, her hair a mess like a nest. Exhausted, Ulysses stumbles into his haven, a two-room apartment, having passed by the taupe vestibule’s Charybdis, its mailbox, filled with bills starving for their pounds of flesh, to behold as he does…
Nathaniel A. Schmidt
October 30, 2014
Poetry

What Is Man that Thou Art Mindful of Him

What do we mean when we say children are God’s artistry as preachers are wont to do during baptisms, deleting from their homilies words like “daughter” and “girl” as they exhort their faithful not to deface her beauty? Her cries, while precious, necessary, compelling her mother from tranquil acceptance to energized aid in the nursery, are hardly melodic like deft little fingers dropped by a pianist on his Steinway, the right hand aware of what the left, separate, is doing,…
Nathaniel A. Schmidt
October 30, 2014