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Poetry

Poetry

Like Water

“Like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be recovered …” – 2 Samuel 14:14 In a hospital room of white linen and metal gates he lay as a bowl tilted, emptied of half of himself. (Life absorbs as by a cloth.) We watched his eyes intently then; we had no container to put him in. Weeks later he died in a living room, the vessel emptied, a mirror on the cold wooden floor. It has long since evaporated and…
June 30, 2016
Poetry

Tornado

Fir needles like rattling bones. The air a myth that has been told and retold, fading from emerald to onyx. My skeleton soft like honey, I am a bowl at the edge of the table, waiting to be spilled. The bold silence. Fallen water pooling over asphalt. Fear so absolute it must be forgotten. Heather Cadenhead graduated from Union University and is the mother of two boys, one of whom is on the autism spectrum. She writes at frayedflowers.com. Image…
April 30, 2016
Poetry

Before My Son’s Autism Diagnosis

Nine months of darkness, then the sound of scissors and we separate. I thought I’d love you because you were part of me, feathered limb of a sumac— but it was like falling asleep. Something I did without fear of consequences. That first night, you made the house ache with your sadness. Open mouth of a baby bird, longing. But you took nothing, the thing I begged you not to take. Something I didn’t know how to give. Heather Cadenhead…
April 30, 2016
Poetry

John 8: 1-11

Like a mat they beat her out, dragged her sorry ass to the court and called for Jesus. Jesus, Jesus. He washed his hands, slipped his feet into his sandals and went out. He watched her, folded, the red dirt combing the sides of her head, blood running into the streets. Angry men clanging, He knelt beside her, his finger dragging in the soil. Her eyes opened – Then, she saw the marble throne of God, the choir of angels…
February 29, 2016
Poetry

Walking Today

Walking gets me nowhere I walk to buy groceries I walk to the coffee shop I walk to be inspired I walk and remember that it takes lungs, muscles, neuron connections, and these lovely padded feet, for my body to move from somewhere to anywhere else. Walking gets me nowhere but to myself. Grace Miguel Cipriano is a senior at Western Theological Seminary. Photo: Stefanos Papachristou/Flickr, under CC BY-NC 2.0 license.
February 29, 2016
Poetry

New Pictures

For sad people like us it helps to have pictures— or rather, new pictures to displace familiar ones. Old pictures don’t change. I once had a picture of a chicken in mid-flight. I used to laugh at it. Now it seems utterly banal compared to the picture of you tackling your sister. In it, you are goofy-gorgeous. I used to think of life as an ocean of pictures; these days I think of it as a river in linear motion.…
December 31, 2015
Poetry

Dramatis

Poor lovers, we know our parts none too well, nor our cues. We kiss in the dark, backstage, under the glow of EXIT, near stacked chairs. Music emanates from an orchestra pit out there in the lights, in the heat, and we strain to hear through velvet the arrow that points to our time to stumble out, screw up, a thousand sleepless eyes gazing, papers rustling, no applause but the rain falling in sheets across the theater roof, gurgling in…
December 31, 2015
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…
October 31, 2015
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…
October 31, 2015