Poets of Faith

January 23, 2015

“Signs and Wonders” by Ted EisenbergPosted by

Ted Eisenberg

SIGNS AND WONDERS

If the dance of a leaf in the wind
is not a woman in disguise,
then I am not a man
and know nothing of holiness.
If the wind is not a plea
to change my ways,
the sap of maple
not an expression of mother’s milk,
the autumn rain
not a lament for Adam;
if papers dropped by strangers
are only papers,
and not reminders,
and peeling paint not portent;
if dreams are only dreams,
and not stories my father neglected,
what’ll I do.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

__________

Ted Eisenberg: “I am the president of a synagogue in New Jersey. My sense is that to believe is less important in Judaism than to sanctify life. Irrespective of belief, do the ‘right thing.’ Help the poor, our doubts notwithstanding. In so doing, we mimic an idea of the divine and perfect the world. Even in a doubt-filled and fragmented cosmos, belief makes its stand. If I feel myself as an isolated part—from what whole am I parted? Poetry grasps disparate bits of experience and joins them in the mind’s light. This interconnectedness resonates with the oneness of an overarching mind. Perhaps our thinking partakes of ‘The Idea.’”

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January 22, 2015

“Little Eucharist” by Phillip T. EgelstonPosted by

Phillip T. Egelston

LITTLE EUCHARIST

Shortbread, blackberry wine
are, to my mind, fine and
not unlike the Body and
Blood of Christ received
on any bright morning 
steeped in sunshine and in sin,
just before the joy busts in.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

__________

Phillip T. Egelston: “As a very young boy growing up in a small town, I found that I was drawn to certain members of the church who seemed to exude something like a ‘force field’ of peace. Their simplicity and grace amounted to more than any elements of doctrine which I, as a child, would not have understood anyway. In the creating of poetry, I do not always write from a strictly faith-based Christian point of view, but transcendence is always of major importance to me in a way that is more personal than abstract.”

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January 21, 2015

“Ode to Bobs, Breasts, and Beauty” by Jaclyn DwyerPosted by

Jaclyn Dwyer

ODE TO BOBS, BREASTS, AND BEAUTY

The same day Brad Pitt cuts his hair,
I play Bernice, drag my husband
to the strip mall Supercuts and lop off

thirteen inches of wavy locks
everyone tells me is so pretty.
It turns out more bowl than bob,

and I’m afraid I look just like
my mother when my husband says,
You look like Anna Wintour.

I picture a mom sending me to school
in Chanel instead of Velcro shoes
too clotted with fuzz to stay closed, but can’t

imagine ever calling my Rob, a Bob
my Rob, who called me Kitty Pryde
when we first met. I wore bright boots

over tights, and passed through
crowds on St. Charles, effortless
as the notes from the street band

trombone, though my breasts
were more Tomb Raider than
intangible, so round and full

once a stranger in the locker room
asked, What’s your surgeon’s name?
Skipped right past Are they real?

and Can I touch? to Where
did you get them? Like my boobs
are a pair of shoes. My momma!

I wanted to say. No one
would believe me now, sloping
domes like high-rise muffins,

soften to the shape of anything.
I’m just happy to have a husband
who knows what Vogue looks like.

How I watched Anna fidget alone
in Federer’s box during the epic
Open he finally lost to Nadal,

cinching her cardigan close,
shoulders hunched over knees,
trying to hide. I remember pulling

a curtain of hair over my face
in the bath. Every night
I would disappear in the tub.

Now there is nothing to hide
behind, nothing to be beautiful
for me. The grocery bagger

offers unsolicited advice, that
I don’t need the anti-wrinkle
creams that promise minted skin.

When I ask Rob what I can do
to make myself more attractive,
he says, I have no idea what

you are talking about. He says,
Your neck is a long, white
baseline I stand behind to serve.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

__________

Jaclyn Dwyer: “I am a practicing Catholic. My faith gives me hope that any of this matters: poetry, prayer, even the people in my life. Without it I probably would have given up writing long ago.”

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January 20, 2015

“Transfiguration of the Beekeeper’s Daughter” by Todd DavisPosted by

Todd Davis

TRANSFIGURATION OF THE BEEKEEPER’S DAUGHTER

Because the bees flew toward light the color of honey, she couldn’t see them
but heard their hum, deep thrum of the colony come out of the hive, comb
dripping with loss and the smoke her father used to subdue, to pacify
the fear that might spur an attack. It wasn’t until her brother began to cry
that she noticed her hair was moving, undulating like water
easing from a rapids, alive with an energy she recognized

as the gentle buzzing of hundreds and hundreds of bees.
They swelled along the strands of her hair, remaking the small world
that floated in front of her eyes, as even more bees curled around her face.
She’d seen the woman at the fair who made a beard of bees
for the crowd of farmers and their families. She read about the love
and patience the woman told the newsman was necessary

as their legs and translucent wings crept and fluttered across
the tender flesh under the chin, fanning cheekbones, slipping
over the helix of the outer ear. Like earrings cut into the loveliest
shapes, with colors of burnished gold and copper,
the bees poured over the girl’s scalp, some finding their way down
the collarbone, onto arms and breasts, abdomens pulsing in time

to the electricity along the hind legs that captured the pollen
for the journey back to the hive. She found it impossible to hold still,
unless she thought of that bearded-bee woman, the affection
that transfixes the body while even more bees conceal the feet
and shins, the knees and thighs, until a girl vanishes, and in her place
a glistening, winged seraph takes to the sky.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

[download audio]

__________

Todd Davis: “I’m blessed because I’m allowed to write about the things I love—the woods and streams and animals that live in the 41,000 acres of forest in State Game Lands 108 and 158 above my house here in central Pennsylvania, as well as about the human animals that live inside my house, my dear wife and two sons. I confess I pray to God but struggle with what God might be. I see what I think is God in the faces of my wife and sons, in witnessing the births and deaths of the flora and fauna in the mountains where I live. And my faith is often shaken or crushed when confronted with the horrific tragedies that also comprise most any form of existence in the 21st century. Many sacred traditions have influenced the way I think and try to live, including Transcendentalism and Buddhism. I’d say more often than not I fail in trying to follow the precepts of such sacred traditions. Ultimately, the faith I’ve come to claim as my own is a form of Mennonite Christianity, whose focus upon peace, social justice, and simple living seems to cohere with the upside down kingdom Christ spoke of. I often explore theological conundrums through my poems because I’m not a person who does well with doctrine or orthodoxy. Thank the heavens for metaphor. I think our honest gestures toward mystery are far safer than literalism or any notion that we might use to confine or circumscribe the sacred. I hope many of my books are attempts at those kinds of honest gestures.” (website)

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January 19, 2015

“What Is Faith, After All?” by Carol V. DavisPosted by

Carol V. Davis

WHAT IS FAITH, AFTER ALL?

At ten, newly returned from living in England,
I sat in a rabbi’s study reading about a vicar’s daughter.
When he asked about the novel in my lap, I stammered,
mortified at being caught reading about another religion.
As if faith were so fragile I’d make the switch just like that.
A traitor revealed.

Thirty years later, leaving Russia, my elderly friend
made the sign of the cross over me, as I backed down
the dark staircase, tearful we’d never see each other again.
My religion irrelevant; her protection what mattered.
But didn’t my grandfather trek across Russia’s broad back

to flee Cossack sabers blessed by this sign and Orthodox priests
sprinkling holy water on soldiers itching for pogroms?

That same trip, a friend in Novgorod gave me an icon
for safe travels back to America. I tucked it in my suitcase,
unsure if it would protect or doom me.

This act of betrayal could pull down the belly of the plane.

Now on the computer a writer talks about his new-found faith.
My husband walks in; my cheeks burn with betrayal, the red
snaking down my neck, my body, as if by listening I am signing
on and that man in sandals and dusty robes will enter and snatch me forever.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

[download audio]

__________

Carol V. Davis: “I have been exploring faith and doubt and also superstition in my poetry. Judaism is complicated as it’s also a culture, a history, an identity. I have gone in and out of religious observance, but never lost my Jewish identity. The past some years I have returned to belief and, as a result, observance. All I can say is that it has taken on a central core to my being and has to do with a dialog with something greater than people, with G-d, if you will.”

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January 16, 2015

“Apophatic” by Maryann CorbettPosted by

Maryann Corbett

APOPHATIC

O absent Mind, blank where I fire this prayer,
tongue-tangled Word my neurons flash into flesh
because they must, might you be this: a brash-
ness of Terrible Two whose wild career
of sheer will muddles all my mother-care?
whose not-a-care heaves flood and avalanche?
lets blocky Towers tippy-topple and crash?
giggles delight while crackhead comets steer
headlong at little worlds? Might you be this:
all pink-cheeked lovable but not yet master
at seeing your lovely patterns as disaster?
So rapt up in unwinding fiddle-ferns
you think death changes nothing?
    No. This is
all error. But it helps me come to terms.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

__________

Maryann Corbett: “I’ve been involved with Catholic liturgical music in one way or another for some 50 years. Mostly that has meant singing in choirs or ensembles—church choirs, or the choirs of church-affiliated schools. Performing this way can have a Zen quality: it demands such total attention that it removes the singer from self-awareness. To sing the Allegri ‘Miserere Mei’ or the Duruflé Requiem can be a way of disappearing into the divine. But it also demands one’s presence in churches. That means being constantly immersed in religious art, steeped in Scripture and homily, and forced to grapple not only with the divine presence but also with the Church itself, its official and sometimes discomforting doctrines, its history, and its misdeeds. Those are the problems I often juggle in the poems—those, and the problems everyone juggles, like the persistence of evil and the apparent absence of God in the world. And then there’s also my long education in religious schools, which predisposes me to see religious metaphor all around and to gravitate toward poets in the canon who see it too.”

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January 14, 2015

“Dua for Dervishes” by Michael CirelliPosted by

Michael Cirelli

DUA FOR DERVISHES

The crests of his dress
In 3s like sets of waves,
An O on the stage, a groove
Ground by soft leather soles
O perfect circle etched!
O spinning cipher human planet! 
O the body void! O null.
Everything the Sufi does
Is for the love of Allah I’m told.
But when the dance was over
He came out smoking a Marlboro
In a cheap pleather jacket
And knockoff Nikes.
His hair flopped limp
On his forehead with each
Overextended inhale.
O the disappointment 
As he scrolled on his smartphone,
Earbuds clogging his head
With Katy Perry I now suspect.
O Facebook for the love of Allah!
O fake Nikes for the love of Allah!
O iPhones O iTunes O iClouds
Overhead for the love of Allah.
Roar for the love of Allah!
I ran into my accountant halfway
Around the world that night,
My accountant for the love of Allah.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

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Michael Cirelli: “To describe my faith would take chapters, but I’ve finally and thankfully landed on Islam (or it landed on me—Mash’Allah). It is a widely misinterpreted, misrepresented religion of submission and peace, one that champions women, justice and inclusion. Islam affects my poetry in complex ways, and in some cases, as a fairly new Muslim, I exoticize my faith and journey. I struggle to find a balance as a writer who ‘wants to share it all,’ and my personal/private relationship with God.”

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