by Matthew Andrews

It’s been written that stones will cry out
to God in the absence of hallelujahs.

What a strange idea: not that stones
could ever be compelled to speech,

but that there is any silence to be found.
On this morning, one like any other,

the harvest of good soil – the parsley,
the tarragon, the chives – and the bacon,

that unclean animal baptized to saltiness,
mix together with the eggs, all transfigured

into a pillowy communion of sunshine,
and I am almost deafened by their praise,

almost driven to tears that any stone-sunk
heart could be deaf to these cries of worship.

Matthew J. Andrews is a private investigator and writer who lives in Modesto, California. His work examines the intersection of the spiritual and the secular, the wrestling match between belief and doubt, and the complications of an ancient faith in a modern world. He can be contacted at matthewjandrews.com.

by Paulette Callen

“He wept, they say, when told of my death.
I always wondered why.”
-Lazarus 40 AD-

“Lazarus, come forth!”
shattered his hope.
Warm light
replaced by cold
stone and death-cave stench.

He struggled to sit up
(the command still pulsed through the sharp edges of broken time)
difficult
bound as he was
from head to toe
in linen strips
difficult
to sit
to stand
to shuffle toward the dusty shaft
of common Judean light
hardly knowing if he was coming or going.

Through a sagging strip
he spied his famous friend
arms outstretched
voice still echoing
through the Valley of the Dead.

He thought
The crowds must be inured to
mere healing
fast food
and traversing water without a boat.
Ah. Well. Death
has made me cynical.

They unwrapped him
and washed him
gave him his robe
and his old job back.

Lazarus shrugged
and waited for the years to pass.

Paulette Callen has returned to her home state of South Dakota in retirement, after 30+ years in New York City. Varying degrees of culture shock in both directions — but always, the place she returned to has been made home by a dog.

by James B. Nicola

New Yorkers have their Central Park,
The Brits, their daily tea;
The conscientious have their lark;
And science, poetry.

A daily drudger, stuck in park,
Will set forth on a sudden spree
When smitten by the smallest spark
Of creativity.

And all souls howl, as canines bark,
To spite raw apathy.
And you, who dote upon the dark,
Upon request, have me.

James B. Nicola, a returning contributor, is the author of six collections of poetry, the latest being Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense. His decades of working in the theater culminated in the nonfiction book Playing the Audience: The Practical Guide to Live Performance, which won a Choice award.

by Eugene Platt

In idyllic days before breast cancer crept into our home,
upsetting its serenity, eventually leaving us alone
at opposite ends of eternity, going to church
on Sundays was part of our romance.

Week after wistful week, I return to Saint James
and sit in the same pew, although without you
sitting beside me, shoulder to shoulder,
thigh to thigh, our fingers entwined.

The setting is sacred but bereft
of something sorely missed.
It is and is not the same.

You would be pleased, though, to know the liturgy
has not changed, the congregation still affirms
its faith in the words of the Nicene Creed,
words we said in unison with others.

Most of the hymns are familiar to me,
although it is hard to sing lines like
“Joyful, joyful we adore Thee,”
when I cannot see you peripherally.

The setting is sacred but bereft
of something sorely missed.
It is and is not the same.

In deference to you, I take the Eucharist,
kneeling pitifully at the altar rail—
surely, with grace this cannot fail
to assuage the anguish within.

From the emptying churchyard I drive home along
oak-canopied Fort Johnson Road, then our street,
a twenty-minute trip that once was beatific
with anticipation of love before lunch.

The drive is scenic but bereft
of something sorely missed.
It is and is not the same.

Eugene Platt, an active octogenarian, was born in Charleston, South Carolina. After serving in the Army, he earned a Diploma in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin. He lives in Charleston with his main muses: Montreal-born wife Judith, corgi Bess, cats Finnegan and Maeve.

by Jack Eisenman

Preacher said
God’s in heaven
Waiting for me
To come stay
With him
Someday.

I saw him yesterday
Leaning against the oak
When I landed hard
But didn’t break anything
Of tree climbing value.

Jack Eisenman is Professor Emeritus of Education and Religion at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He has written poetry since the early 1960’s. Jack enjoys creating poems that have a religious/spiritual theme.

by Kelly Sargent

You kept a rusty, Bugs Bunny tin of marbles in our bedroom
on the shelf you thought I couldn’t reach
because you dreamt they might be worth something,

Someday.

I found one under your bed this morning when I was clearing out Mom’s house
and your side of the room exactly as you had left it.

A cerulean blue glassy cat’s eye stared at me
lifelessly

from the dark corner of the rectangular outline —
darker than the rest of the Brazilian cherry wood floor —
that the sun had never touched.

I reached for it.

Cool — almost chilled — it was, by the absence of life-giving rays.
Smooth it was, in its betraying lack of indentations.
It was weightier than I had expected.

My fingertips caressed it, gently at first;
then, with increasing pressure, earnestly hoping to infuse it with life.
I wanted it to see me,
and be happy to be found.

But it didn’t know that it had been lost,
and could not find joy in the moment.

Like you.
With the blue, glassy stare you gave me when I found you
in your bed
when you were 16.
You didn’t know that one to match lay on the wooden floor beneath you.

I recalled the time that I spilled your collection,
and how the clatter roused you from a lazy Sunday nap.
I froze in place and shivered, anticipating your ire.

You considered me with cerulean compassion,
a golden lock matted against your forehead.
And you laughed silver strands of grace at me.

I never knew the last time I laughed with you
would be the last time I laughed with you,
until it was.

I nestled the marble in my palm
and put it in my pocket.

It was worth something.

Born hard of hearing and adopted in Luxembourg, Kelly Sargent grew up with a deaf twin sister in Europe and the United States. She wrote for a national newspaper for the Deaf, and is also a published artist. Believing that the Deaf and hard of hearing need to be heard as an overlooked subculture, she hopes to make her voice seen as a HOH poet.

by C. J. Kreit

Paddling along the striated cliffs, the guide tells us
That the rocks were deposited up to a billion years ago,
How each color was formed by layers of minerals.
Iron, manganese, copper, and limonite:
Red, black, blue, and white.

But he cannot explain
Why my breath catches at the sunlight
Capering among the cold, clean waves,
The way it dances along the towering rock face,
Breathing the colors to life
Like scarlet and sapphire skirts twirling
To music played on a weather-worn piano,
Accompanied by the crush of waves
And the squalling of seagulls.

Dwarfed in the shadow of splendor,
I sit in my boat, astonished into silence
As if the hand of God has stilled me.

What is it here for if not to inspire awe?
What are we here for if not to delight in beauty?

C.J. Kreit lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband and two young sons, but she grew up in Michigan, where she fell in love with the Great Lakes. Along with reading and writing, she enjoys working with horses, hiking, and other outdoor activities.

by Dana Miller

Well done, us!
No one ever saw us tumble out of the grandfather clock, one after the other like so many Bacha Posh acrobats, seconds ahead of being conspicuously late to dinner yet again.
We were always conspiratorially chased by a brace of over-friendly rooks,
our palms coated in negligible nectarine,
drowned scone smidgens and squid giggles
falling freely from our peacoat pockets in a techno-pastoral candy-crumb trail like no other.

Pendulum pirates, we were!
Wee nixies of the wry-necked variety,
we danced on the escritoire with our escargot governess and
spent our afternoons playing imperial concertina to the talking apple trees,
blissfully adrift in a world balanced atop a banquet table of overturned canoes
(in which we set up hermitage)
and purple velvet top hats from which we drew no end of magician rabbits, sextets, and spiralized marbles.

Between banana leaves, in balloon sleeves and loudly checked trousers, we took in the beatitudes and other rare wisdoms shared with us by a paradise of best-friend donkeys.
In our butcher’s boy bonnets we brayed right in tune with them, boxing the boxwood hedgerows for their verdant impertinence,
blowing dizzy pinwheels round and round the cricket carousels while
chips of beggar granite that were really square-cut emeralds
emptied from our willow-woven pouches.
All appeared a graceful gambol of divine disgrace. All forgot to forget time.

No one ever had to invent Christmas for us!
Not for us any stale Savile Row suspenders or stealsome Steerforth storm-shanties.
Smacks of jellyfish formed our carpets and Sedgemoor geese (our sentinels and soldiers)
flew in full fleabitten regalia.
Up and up the skinna-ma-rink spiral staircase where it was forever Saturday we skipped,
chimera-cat kites in tow, kerchiefs dutifully askew around eager foreheads,
socks slinking at separate speeds like a rigged race of mismatched inchworms
down coltish legs already bramble-run to blue-black bruises.

Primed to picnic on gingerbread and currant trifle
in our public library of gorse and heather,
we made a sport of counting the gold buttons worn by our mouse footmen
even as we pulled faces in their aurelian reflections.
Off we then pirouetted across the Victorian Goonie planks,
their strigose squeaks a Spirograph symphony we deliberately played
as well or better as ever did Wolfgang his zebra keys,
wicking cockles and cake from our crumpled quartos of Brontës even as we spun.

They say half of nothing is nothing;
to you and me, it was two of everything,
and because of this we more than thrice-doubled the anythings
we still know we could be.
Well done, us.

Dana Miller is a wicked wordsmith, giggling provocateuse, and mega-melomaniac from Atlanta, Georgia. When not wielding a lethal pen, Dana adores surf culture, Australian grunge rockers, muscle cars, Epiphone guitars, glitter, Doc Martens, and medieval-looking draft horses with feathered feet.

by Marianne Lyon

I circle dawn lake
stop at brilliant light patch
scented Pinecones drop

From ceiling of trees
blackbirds preen on branches
sagging over tarn

Am drawn to clearing
cannot walk by      breathe deeper
lose urge to go on

Is God right here
He may be      dear Rumi
but still I feel adrift

He gently whispers
look for unmarked path
feel your breathing unravel

Still hear breeze on lake
a song that blackbirds imitate
I walk off matey footpath

Off familiar stretch
silence walks with me
wish I was a bird

A black bird      not lost
cheeping long vowels
trilling      contented

Marianne Lyon has been a music teacher for 43 years. After teaching in Hong Kong she returned to the Napa Valley and has been published in various literary magazines and reviews. Nominated for the Pushcart Award 2016. She has spent time teaching in Nicaragua. She is a member of the California Writers Club, Solstice Writers in St. Helena California. She is an Adjunct Professor at Touro University Vallejo California. She was awarded the Napa Country Poet Laureate 2021 title.

by Wm. Walters

And this too, we know, is a gift come from God—
A glimpse of the gladness of mind in creation,
A glint off the shells on the shore where we play.
We’ll revel in this—and all truths revealed to us.
Love works a wonder once more in our lives;
His name will be Isaac, and we’ll laugh with God.

Wm. Walters is a professor of English and linguistics at Rock Valley College, in Rockford, IL (US). His grandson Isaac is now six years old, and–true to the prophecy of the poem and the meaning of his name–the boy has a knack for making everyone laugh.

by Jennifer Novotney

Two nimble squirrels
scamper through the park.

Like acrobats they dash
across the picnic tables and grass.

dancing toward the seeds of life
scattered across the walkaway

stuffing their cheeks full of next season’s hope
soothsayers who bury the future.

Their little, curved tails electrified
flicking back and forth in rhythmic beats

holding precious kernels
between their delicate forepaws

like two prophets exchanging
their gentle prayers for spring.

Jennifer Novotney holds an M.A. in English from Northern Arizona University. She won a 2014 Moonbeam Children’s Book Award for her debut novel, Winter in the Soul. She grew up in Los Angeles, California and lives in North East Pennsylvania with her family where she teaches English and creative writing.

by Rebecca Villineau

When she died
She came right through the phone
Her voice
Static
A storm
Thickening
Leaves flipping their palms
The wind picking
Up by the sill
I like to believe
She sent a message
In Life, we held silence like bricks
Sometimes
The phone rings
And I’m reminded of
Marigolds
Instant coffee
And my mother calling
Then hanging up

Rebecca Villineau writes and works in the South Coast of Massachusetts. She works full time as social worker in a local hospital. Her writing is inspired by the ghosts that keep entering her poetry.

by Raquel Morris

Sea Song

I open my shut eyes
Being stroked by the burgeoning sun
I rise with it’s proclamation
of a new day.

Like the waves of the ocean
Each morning washes over me
Holding it’s own energy.

I sit in stillness
Awaiting like a lonely shore
Searching for what gifts
the tide brings.

What relics from the past
Will make their way
To my hands?

What wisdom will be given
From the echoes
Of the Sea’s song.

Raindrops

Raindrops fall to the Earth
Mirroring my tears.
So many Grandparents and Elders
Lost in one year.

Collective grief
in isolation.
With loved ones dying.
In overflowing ICUs.
I. See. You.
Even though I can’t.

We are forced to grieve alone.
In bed and in our fuzzy pajamas
To bring us comfort
In the collapse.
The rain reminds us
That God cries too.

At least that’s what we were told
When we were children
Whether we were walking home
in waist high water
Or jumping in puddles
We were left longing
For the warmth of home.

My tears fall for my grandfather.
Grateful I got to say my Goodbyes.
Held his soft fragile hand in mine
Locked all the details
In my mind
Gave him one last hug
Blanketing him with love
To take on his journey above.
Raindrops fall to the Earth.

Raquel has a life long love of poetry since first reading Shel Silverstein at five years old. Poetry is an expression of her experience as a Native American woman, mother, social worker, activist, and mystic.

by Keith Burton

Though burdened with the cross,
Jesus stopped to say farewell
To his mother.

“For nine months I was you,
One body, one breath, two souls,
You were the tree that fed my tender vine.

The road I walk does not end today,
But stops where time forgets to breathe.

This pinch of pain is salt
Which stings yet cleans the wound.

And, so it is with you.

Every tear you shed
Will heal an injured heart,
Which left alone
Would crack like brittle leaves.

The crown you wear is earned
Each single day.

Continue life
Although your child has died.”

Although I’m American, I spent two memorable years in English boarding school. Their emphasis on literature became a foundation for writing songs which allowed me to perform all over the States. I love the saints of all religions and was honored to meet Mother Theresa, and the Dalai Lama.

by Jan Darrow

this cathedral
is a forest of god
returning patterns sleep
on timber floors
trees hold prayers
in the cold deep snow
linking ice crystal
architecture
left by clouds

Jan Darrow lives in Michigan with her husband and daughter where she connected with the natural world at an early age. She currently has two books of poetry and a book of flash fiction available on Amazon.